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Using MetaCentrum with Claude skill

The metacentrum skill teaches Claude, Anthropic's AI assistant, how to use MetaCentrum, the Czech national grid run by CESNET. It is the MetaCentrum counterpart of the ceico-compute skill for Phoebe and Koios. With it, Claude Code can help you with:

  • your account: who can register, how to apply, change the password and renew the account every year
  • logging in: choosing a frontend, getting a Kerberos ticket, SSH with Kerberos and fixing a login that fails; optionally a ticket obtained at desktop login and renewed automatically, as described in Passwordless SSH with Kerberos
  • storage: the /storage/<site>/home directories, which frontend sees which storage, backups and scratch space
  • PBS jobs: job scripts with qsub resources, walltime and scratch staging, the oven queue for long-running services, HyperQueue for many small tasks, following a job and finding out why it failed
  • GPUs: requesting GPUs, finding which GPU clusters are free and open to you (some are reachable only through queues restricted to certain groups) and checking the GPU inside a job

Queues, nodes and modules on MetaCentrum change often. The skill treats them as live data and checks them on a frontend (qstat, pbsnodes, module avail) before it relies on them. Its source is on GitHub: ceico-cz/metacentrum-compute-skill.

What you need

  • A MetaCentrum account, see Get an account. The skill can guide you through the registration, but you fill in the form yourself.
  • A seat in one of the CEICO organizations on claude.ai, CEICO-Cosmo or CEICO-FZU (ask the cluster administrator). The metacentrum skill is in the skill library of both.
  • Claude Code on your computer, signed in with that claude.ai account (claude in a terminal, or the Code tab of the Claude desktop app). Claude needs a shell with ssh to reach a MetaCentrum frontend.

In the claude.ai chat, without a terminal, the skill can still answer questions and write job scripts, but you copy them to the frontend and submit them yourself.

Without a seat in either organization, you can install the skill yourself as a Claude Code plugin:

/plugin marketplace add ceico-cz/metacentrum-compute-skill
/plugin install metacentrum@ceico-metacentrum

or copy the directory skills/metacentrum from the repository into ~/.claude/skills/. The same directory works with OpenAI Codex in ~/.codex/skills/.

Check that you have the skill

The skill comes with your CEICO-Cosmo or CEICO-FZU seat; you don't install anything. Type /skills in Claude Code to list your skills: metacentrum should be among them. If it is missing, quit Claude Code and start it again so that it loads the organization's skills, and check that you are signed in with that organization's account.

You don't call the skill by name. Claude uses it whenever you mention MetaCentrum, PBS or qsub.

Use it

Start Claude Code in the directory with your code and describe what you want, for example:

Set up Kerberos SSH to the MetaCentrum frontend metafzu.fzu.cz for my user novak.

Write a PBS script that runs train.py on one GPU with 32 GB RAM for 12 hours, using scratch.

Which GPU clusters on MetaCentrum can I actually submit to right now?

My job 12345678.pbs-m1.metacentrum.cz finished but produced no output. Find out why.

Claude asks only for what it can't find out itself, usually your MetaCentrum username, the frontend, the command to run and the resources it needs. When it writes a job script, it explains every placeholder you have to fill in, uses $SCRATCHDIR if you asked for scratch and copies the results back to your home before the job ends. After the job ends, it checks the exit status, the resources used and the output before it calls the job a success.

Claude Code asks for your permission before it runs commands, unless you have allowed them. Read what it wants to run, as you would for a colleague typing on your account.

What the skill does not do

  • It never asks for your password, Kerberos ticket cache, private keys or tokens. Run kinit and type the password yourself.
  • On its own, it only looks: it reads queues, nodes and job states. It submits (qsub) or cancels (qdel) jobs and changes your configuration only when you ask.
  • It doesn't run computations on a frontend; frontends are for logging in, preparing files and PBS commands.
  • It can't change your MetaCentrum quotas, group memberships or queue access. For those, contact MetaCentrum user support.

Good to know

  • Everything Claude reads, including your code, job output and file names, is sent to Anthropic to be processed. Don't use it with data you are not allowed to share with a cloud service.
  • Claude can make mistakes. Check the job script it shows you, especially the walltime, memory, scratch size and the number of GPUs, before you agree to submit.
  • MetaCentrum is a third-party system; its own documentation is authoritative. If the skill gives outdated information, open an issue in ceico-cz/metacentrum-compute-skill, with usernames and job IDs removed.