MetaCentrum¶
MetaCentrum is the national grid computing infrastructure of the Czech Republic, operated by CESNET as part of e-INFRA CZ. It is free for researchers at Czech academic institutions, including CEICO members, and provides many thousands of CPU cores and GPUs spread over clusters across the country.
MetaCentrum is a third-party system: it has its own accounts, rules, support and user documentation. This section covers only what is specific to CEICO users.
How it differs from Phoebe and Koios¶
| Phoebe and Koios | MetaCentrum | |
|---|---|---|
| Account | CEICO account, SSH key | separate MetaCentrum account and password |
| Authentication | SSH key | password or Kerberos ticket (realm META) |
| Workload manager | Slurm (sbatch, squeue) |
PBS Pro (qsub, qstat) |
| Storage | BeeGFS home directories (one per cluster) and project space | separate storage per site, under /storage/<site>/ |
Get an account¶
Registration needs a valid academic affiliation, which FZU provides. Fill in the short form linked from the MetaCentrum account page; new applications are approved manually within a few working days. Accounts expire every year on 2 February. MetaCentrum emails a renewal request around the turn of the year.
Log in¶
The FZU frontend is metafzu.fzu.cz (also reachable as metafzu.metacentrum.cz). It runs
Debian 12 and is dedicated to FZU users; any other
MetaCentrum frontend
works as well.
This asks for your MetaCentrum password every time. To log in without a password and have
qsub, qstat and storage access work on the frontend straight away, set up
passwordless SSH with Kerberos.
Guides¶
-
Passwordless SSH with Kerberos
Get a Kerberos ticket at desktop login, keep it renewed and use it for SSH.
-
Multi-cluster jobs with HyperQueue
Run one set of tasks across MetaCentrum, Phoebe and Koios.
Support
For MetaCentrum accounts, quotas and outages, contact MetaCentrum user support, not the CEICO HPC administrator.