I renewed my account with ComputeCanada, which is available for all Canadian University researchers (professors and adjuncts), and students and postdocs they work with. Here are a few notes that might be handy later.

Accounts

Sign up for an account.

This will get you access to the clusters

Login

Login with ssh:

ssh username@beluga.computecanada.ca

Use the same password as the one for your Compute Canada account here.

You can use SSH keys to login without a password. After you’ve followed the instructions at that link, you won’t have to use your password anymore.

For a little extra convenience, especially if you use multiple servers with different keys and usernames, add your details to .ssh/config:

Host beluga
     HostName beluga.computecanada.ca
     User username
     IdentityFile ~/.ssh/my_rsa_key

This will allow me to login to the beluga.computecanada.ca cluster as user username, using the private key ~/.ssh/my_rsa_key, with just the following command (and no password):

ssh beluga

This also allows me to open files on the cluster directly from my local Emacs instance:

M-x find-file
/ssh:beluga:~/path/to/file/on/beluga

Installing R Libraries

TODO Installing libraries so the whole team can share them.