Accessing the machine

Getting an account on palmetto essentially means giving your Clemson account the ability to log into palmetto. Your account comes with 50 GB of disk storage and a file limit of 1,000,000 files.

The palmetto cluster is accessed via a login or front-end node called user. To start using the cluster, log into user with secure shell ssh:

After entering your password, you will be brought to the Linux prompt. The first time you log in you must set up an environment that will allow you to run jobs on the cluster nodes without supplying your password in every case. The way we have chosen to do this is by using RSA public/private key pairs. This is easily accomplished by typing in the following commands:

$ ssh-keygen -t rsa
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/home/userid/.ssh/id_rsa):
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:
Your identification has been saved in /home/userid/.ssh/id_rsa.
Your public key has been saved in /home/userid/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.
The key fingerprint is: 64:72:2a:7b:20:fa:a7:0c:91:26:a6:43:85:0b:1c:21 userid@user
$ cd .ssh
$ cp id_rsa.pub authorized_keys

It is suggested that you use the defaults, including no passphrase. (Passphrases cannot be retrieved if lost or forgotten.) For more information, see man ssh-keygen.

At this point you are ready to access your file space, compile your code, set up job files, submit jobs, and so forth.

Palmetto runs the CentOS distribution of the Linux operating system. Your default shell will be bash. We strongly recommend using bash, but if you prefer to use a different shell, you should contact us to make the change for you.

Apple provides an overview of shells at their Technology Overview: Basic Shell Concepts. For an overview of bash, see the Slackware Linux Basics.