HPC Cluster Setup

These instructions assume you already have SIERRA working with your project on your local machine. If you haven’t done that yet–shoo!

This setup applies to the following SIERRA HPC cluster environments:

ARGoS Setup on HPC Clusters

The steps to properly configure the C++ libraries for ARGoS and your Project for use with SIERRA in one of the above environments are:

  1. Build ARGoS natively for your cluster for maximum efficiency.

    Note

    If your HPC cluster is 1/2 Intel chips and 1/2 AMD chips, you may want to compile ARGoS twice, natively on each chipset. If you do this, you can set SIERRA_ARCH prior to invoking SIERRA so that the correct ARGoS commands can be generated, depending on what the chipset is for the nodes you request for your HPC job.

  2. Your project .so should be built natively on each different type of compute node SIERRA might be run on, just like ARGOS, for maximum efficiency with large swarms. You can use ARGOS_PLUGIN_PATH (which is not modified by SIERRA) to specify where the library should be loaded from (e.g., using SIERRA_ARCH as the switch in your script which invokes SIERRA).

Once ARGoS/your C++ code has been built, you can setup SIERRA:

  1. Install SIERRA package by following the instructions in SIERRA Installation Reference.

  2. Verify GNU parallel is installed; if it is not installed, ask your cluster admin to install it for you.

  3. Clone plugin for whatever project you are going to use somewhere on your SIERRA_PLUGIN_PATH. SIERRA will refuse to do anything useful if there is no project selected. The repository should be cloned into a directory with the EXACT name you want it to be callable with on the cmdline via --project.

  4. Read the documentation for HPC Execution Environment Plugins, and select and appropriate plugin to use. Be sure to define all necessary environment variables!!

GazeboS Setup on HPC Clusters

TBD.