Workflow Migration from Laptop to HPC
Moving your work from a laptop or workstation to Anunna is mostly a change of mindset: instead of running things interactively and waiting at your screen, you describe what you want, hand it to the scheduler, and let it run. This page is a high-level guide to making that transition.
What changes
- You do not run work interactively. On your laptop you run a script and watch it. On the cluster you submit it as a job and the scheduler runs it when resources are free — see Batch Jobs. The login nodes are only for editing, transferring data, and submitting jobs.
- You ask for resources explicitly. CPUs, memory, time, and GPUs are all requested up front — see Scheduler Overview (Slurm).
- Storage is tiered. Active data goes on the fast Lustre filesystem, not your home directory, and you need to know what is backed up — see Storage Systems Overview and Backup Policy.
- Software comes from modules. Instead of installing everything yourself, you load it with modules, or install into your own environment — see Installing Personal Software.
A typical first migration
- Get an account and log in — see Who Can Access? and SSH Access.
- Move your data and code across — see Data Transfer Methods.
- Find your software as modules, or set up your own environment — see Software Overview.
- Test on something small in an interactive job to check it runs on the cluster.
- Wrap the working commands in a batch script and submit it — see Batch Jobs.
- Scale up: many inputs at once with job arrays, or more cores and nodes with threads and MPI.
- For multi-step analyses, consider a workflow engine.
Tips
- Start small. Get one step working as a job before scaling to your whole dataset.
- Request only the resources you need — over-requesting just means longer waits in the queue.
- Keep your work reproducible from the start — see Reproducibility Guidelines.