Getting started
Getting started with Julia on a new cluster can sometimes be a challenge. Below we provide some common tips that will hopefully help you with your onboarding process.
Julia binaries or Julia module
When starting on a new HPC cluster the first thing you should do is figure out if there is a pre-configured Julia module (Lmod module) available on the cluster. To that end, module key julia or module spider julia might be helpful commands.
If there isn't a Julia module available that you can load, you should use the regular, pre-built Julia binaries. You can either download (e.g. wget or curl) them directly from the website or use juliaup. In any case, you should not build Julia from source (unless you have a very good reason and know that you're doing).
Placing the Julia depot
One you have julia, you must make sure that the Julia depot is placed on an appropriate file system. By default, it will be stored in $HOME/.julia. This may or may not be a good choice. What you want is a place on a file system with the following properties
no tight quotas (at least >= 20 GB)
read and write access (ideally also from compute nodes)
good (parallel) I/O
no automatic deletion of unused files (or otherwise you have to find a workaround)
Often times these criterion are best fit on a parallel file system (which $HOME rarely is). For this reason it might be necessary to set JULIA_DEPOT_PATH=/path/to/fast/fs/.julia.
Note that if the last point (automatic deletion of unused files) is an issue for you, a pragmatic workaround could be a cronjob that touches all files in the Julia depot every once in a while.
Last modified: March 20, 2024. Website built with Franklin.jl and the Julia programming language.