Quest and Kellogg Linux Cluster Downtime, December 14 - 18.Quest, including the Quest Analytics Nodes, the Genomics Compute Cluster (GCC), the Kellogg Linux Cluster (KLC), and Quest OnDemand, will be unavailable for scheduled maintenance starting at 8 A.M. on Saturday, December 14, and ending approximately at 5 P.M. on Wednesday, December 18. During the maintenance window, you will not be able to login to Quest, Quest Analytics Nodes, the GCC, KLC, or Quest OnDemand submit new jobs, run jobs, or access files stored on Quest in any way including Globus. For details on this maintenance, please see the Status of University IT Services page.
Quest RHEL8 Pilot Environment - November 18.Starting November 18, all Quest users are invited to test and run their workflows in a RHEL8 pilot environment to prepare for Quest moving completely to RHEL8 in March 2025. We invite researchers to provide us with feedback during the pilot by contacting the Research Computing and Data Services team at quest-help@northwestern.edu. The pilot environment will consist of 24 H100 GPU nodes and seventy-two CPU nodes, and it will expand with additional nodes through March 2025. Details on how to access this pilot environment will be published in a KB article on November 18.
How to use RStudio on the Quest Analytics Nodes.
Overview
The Quest Analytics Nodes allow users with active Quest allocations to use RStudio from a web browser. See Research Computing: Quest Analytics Nodes for an overview of the system.
Note: you cannot submit jobs to the Quest job scheduling system using the Quest Analytics Nodes.
Connecting
Users must already have a Quest account and an active Quest allocation.
Connections to the Quest Analytics Nodes are limited to the Northwestern network. If you are connecting from off-campus, you must use the Northwestern VPN.
Using any browser, connect to: https://rstudio.questanalytics.northwestern.edu
Sign in with your NetID and password.
Transferring and Accessing Files
All of the Quest file systems are accessible from the Quest Analytics Nodes. You can transfer files using the methods to transfer files to Quest more generally.
You can also transfer files smaller than 500MB using the Files tab in RStudio. There is an upload button that will allow you to select files from your computer to transfer.
When you connect to RStudio, you will initially be in your home directory. This is /home/<netid> on Quest.
To access a project directory, click on the button with three small dots on the right in the Files tab. Then enter the full path to your project folder (ex. /projects/<allocationID>).
To transfer files larger than 500MB to Quest, please use SFTP or another transfer method.
Installing Packages
Users may install packages using the Packages tab in RStudio Server version 2023.06 or the install.packages function in R. Some packages that require code to be compiled may need to be installed by connecting to a Quest login node and following the tips below. Please see Installing and Managing R Packages on Quest and Troubleshooting Installing R Packages on Quest and Quest Analytics for more information.
System Details
RStudio Server is version 2023.06. R is version 4.2.3. The Analytics Nodes are limited to running a single version of R for all users.
The Quest Analytics Nodes are shared by many researchers. Please be aware of your memory use when analyzing large data sets. Users utilizing a large amount of memory, especially those using over 60GB of RAM, may be asked to move their analysis to other systems. Multicore and parallel processes should not be run on the Analytics nodes. Users needing to run computationally intensive jobs should schedule interactive or batch jobs on Quest instead of using the Analytics nodes. Please contact Research Computing at quest-help@northwestern.edu with questions about R memory use or analyzing large data sets.
Issues or Problems with the Analytics Nodes
To report issues or problems with the Analytics Nodes, please email quest-help@northwestern.edu with information on which service you were using (RStudio), the error you received or problem you encountered, and what you were doing prior to the problem occurring. Please note that you were using the Analytics Nodes.