Information on the compute facilities hosted by FMRIB
In addition to other Medical Sciences Division or wider-Oxford compute facilities, FMRIB hosts the OxCIN compute facilities, commonly known as OOD. Charges apply for this service - see our charges page for details.
OOD is a compute cluster formed from rack-mounted multi-core computers. To ensure efficient use of the hardware, tasks are distributed amongst these computers using queuing software in the most optimum manner, based on job characteristics (e.g. length, memory requirements, GPU (CUDA) needs, etc), with available time shared out amongst all users. This means you usually have to wait a while for your jobs to complete, but there is the potential to utilise significantly more compute resources than you would have available to you on a single computer such as your laptop or a desktop computer.
For interactive discovery tasks, OOD includes a web interface (using the Open On Demand software) at https://ood.fmrib.ox.ac.uk [Oxford Only] that allows users to launch Linux desktop environments, Jupyter Notebook, R Studio and Mathworks MATLAB sessions; all utilising the underlying compute cluster infrastructure with associated high-memory/core count and CUDA capable hardware.
Portions of this service were funded from Wellcome grants - when publishing work that used these facilities please acknowledge this funding as per our acknowledgment page.
Getting Started
Access to our cluster is primarily via our Open OnDemand web interface (VDI), but for short-term non-graphical access your can SSH to a redundant pair of machines clint.fmrib.ox.ac.uk.
Warning
clint.fmrib.ox.ac.uk must not be used for any processing, they are purely for you to manipulate your files, upload/download data and submit tasks to the queues and to gain access to other resources (they enforce limits on CPU and memory, so significant tasks are likely to take a long time or fail due to lack of RAM). You must use the VDI hosts for anything more significant.
On first connecting your SSH client will ask if you trust the remote server - check that the 'fingerprint' against those published on our SSH page.
Using Software
Software is managed using the Environment Modules tools, so to access neuroimaging software you will need to load the appropriate module.
Storage Locations
User home folders (at /home/fs0/<username>) are intentionally limited in size so do not store any project data in this location. Users have a dedicated scratch folder /vols/Scratch/<username> and you may have access to a research group storage area. Please see our storage locations page.
Graphical Programs
OxCIN users have access to a web-based Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (OOD) that can be used to run graphical software on any of our interactive nodes - these hosts are not accessible by any other route (no direct SSH or VNC access is possible).
Submitting to the Cluster
For information on submitting jobs to the CPU or GPU cluster nodes see our job submission pages.
Hardware details
For details on the CPU/memory and GPUs available please see our Hardware Details page.