Athena

Athena is the name of the Cray XT4 system at NICS. Athena and Kraken are very similar, and much of the documentation that applies to Kraken also applies to Athena. This page will cover a few of the basic differences.

Schedule

Athena is currently being dedicated to certain projects, and is not available for allocation via the TeraGrid Allocation process. As of October 1, Athena is dedicated to a number of high-priority NSF projects, starting with a climate project .

Access

• To get to Athena, use ssh username@athena.nics.utk.edu
• The only accepted authentication method on Athena is the RSA one time passwords: gsissh authentication is not accepted.

File Transfer

• Since gsissh authentication is not allowed, it is not possible to use GridFTP from somewhere else to Athena. Athena does have the Globus clients installed, so you can use globus-url-copy from Athena using the file:// syntax:

   % globus-url-copy -r \
      file:///lustre/scratch/joe/ \
      gsiftp://gridftp-co.ncsa.teragrid.org:2811/joe/

  Note the three slashes.

File Systems

• Athena has its own scratch file system (also mounted as /lustre/scratch). Athena's scratch file system is entirely separate from Kraken's scratch file system. Neither resource can access the other resource's file system. Athena's scratch file system is quite small (85 TB versus 3.3 PB on Kraken). As a result, it is imperative that all users archive actively and clean up old data.

Running Jobs

• Athena has only 4 processing cores per node, as opposed to 12 cores for Kraken.
• Memory on Athena is limited to 1 GB per core or 4 GB per node.

Software

• While the NICS-installed software is generally shared between Kraken and Athena, software from other sources may be slightly different.