Getting started on ARC4

All Postgraduate researchers are entitled to an account on ARC4. You can request an account IT, as detailed on the ARC4 docs page. Taught students may also be entitled but must speak to their supervisor before submitting a request.

Once logged on, you can set up the correct module environment using

$ module use /nobackup/CESM/module_env
$ module load cesm

By default, this will load cesm2.1.3, but you can specify a version using cesm/<version>. Each time you log off ARC4 the environment is reset, so you will need to start each new session by setting the environment. Loading the cesm module also loads the Earth System Modeling Framework (ESMF) module, a high-perfomance, flexible software infrastructure for building and coupling Earth system models. Both modules are found within the module_env directory.

Batch Jobs

ARC4 uses a batch scheduler called Sun Grid Engine (SGE), which allocates resources and prioritises jobs that are submitted to the compute nodes through the queue. There is a fair share policy in place, so a users’ priority will decrease with the more resources they use. More information on writing job submission scripts (job scripts) can be found here: ARC4 job scripts.