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Accessing Katana

Requesting an Account

To apply for an account, please send an email from your UNSW email address to restech.support@unsw.edu.au, giving your zID, your role within UNSW and the name of your supervisor or head of your research group.

Anyone at UNSW can apply for a general account on Katanif they think that Katana would suit their research needs and will typically use less than 10,000 CPU core hours a quarter. If a researcher requires or uses more than that they should also give consideration to using NCI.

All Katana users gets access to help with software installation, getting started on Katana or running their jobs.

The only difference between Katana users is the number of compute jobs that can be run at any time and how long they can run for - general users can only use a 12 hour Walltime.

If your needs require more CPU hours or consulation, some Faculties, Schools and Research Groups have invested in Katana and have a higher level of access. Users in this situation should speak to their supervisor.

Accessing Katana

Connecting to Katana via Terminal

Operating System

From a Linux or Mac OS machine you can connect via ssh in a terminal:

laptop:~$ ssh z1234567@katana.restech.unsw.edu.au

From a Windows machine an SSH client such as Putty or MobaXTerm is required.

If you are comfortable using PowerShell, OpenSSH is available on recent Windows versions. If not present, it can be installed on Windows 10.

You can run a Linux environmet directly on Windows using Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).

There are two ways to install WSL on your system:

  1. On UNSW Windows standard operating environment (SOE) machines you can open the Company Portal App and from there install one of the Linux distrubtions through the 'Apps', the same as you would other applications.
  2. Manually enable WSL in PowerShell and then install a Linux distribution through the Microsoft Store.

Using WSL will not only let you connect to katana with SSH, but also provides many GNU/Linux tools that are useful when working with HPC and research data.

SSH KeepAlive

To stop your connection disconnecting after some idle time, you can send some empty packets to keep your session alive. You want to change the frequency of these packets from 0 (none) to a small time interval, say 60 seconds. The configuration differs depending on the SSH client used.

On PuTTy: Category -> Connection -> "Seconds between keepalives"

On MobaXterm: Settings -> Configuration -> SSH -> SSH keepalive

On Linux and WSL you send keepalive packets for all servers by editing ~/.ssh/config and adding the lines 

   Host *
      ServerAliveInterval 60