Karst Account

Karst, Carbonate and Big Red 200 at Indiana University are high-throughput computing clusters designed to deliver large amounts of processing capacity over long periods of time. All these systems provide batch processing and node-level co-location services that make them well suited for running high-throughput and data-intensive parallel computing jobs.

Access to these machines is available to IU students, faculty, and sponsored affiliates. This page contains a brief tutorial on setting up a Karst account along with links to other webpages with additional information on the various processes completed through Karst. Most of these steps are not specific for Karst and can be followed when setting up other computer accounts.

First-Time Logging In with Karst

Information regarding the additional steps needed after creating your Karst account.

Image Processing with Karst

A collection of data sets and exercises to be run on Karst.

Submitting Jobs to the Queue Manager

Information on the various graphical user interfaces for interacting with the queue manager on Karst.

Rappture Graphical User Interfaces

Information on how to use the Rappture graphical user interfaces.

Rappture Scripts

A collection of various Karst scripts that can be used to submit image processing jobs to the queue manager.

Creating Additional Computer Accounts

Go to the Access Management Page and click on the Create Additional Accounts link.
You will be prompted to enter your IU username and passphrase and only then will you be taken to the next page.
Select an account on Karst, Carbonate, or Big Red 3 (Big Red 200) using the radio buttons.
Click on the Create Account button at the bottom of the page.

You will be contacted via e-mail when the account has been created. This can usually be accomplished the same day you apply to create the account. You will also find it useful to request a Scholarly Data Archive (SDA) account, and it is useful to have accounts on all these campus computer systems if you plan to do extensive image analysis of data collected using the EMC's electron microscopes.

Note: Requesting an account should be done at least a day before attempting to access data. Even if you do not plan to do any image processing using the campus systems, you will need to log onto the system once to prevent trouble accessing your data in the future.

You will need to do several things after logging onto the computer clusters for the first time. Especially if you are unfamiliar with working on a computer that is mostly command line (terminal window) driven, you should work with the staff to do everything necessary.

View our Tutorial on Logging In to Karst and Information for First Time Users

We have posted a short linux tutorial that introduces some of the key concepts that operate inside linux machines and many of the basic commands on the clusters that will be useful to examine and manipulate data collected by the JEOL JEM 3200FS. In addition, the IU Knowledge Base offers a good overview of Karst.

View our brief Linux Tutorial

In addition to this basic understanding of how to work in a command line driven environment, we are creating a series of graphical user interfaces (GUI's) that will interact with the queue manager for Karst and which make submitting jobs to the cluster much easier. This on-going GUI project is driven mostly by need and a reasonably up-to-date list of the programs that can be submitted to the queue manager using these custom built GUI's is available along with other resources:

Please contact David Morgan at dagmorga@indiana.edu about other programs that you would like to submit to the cluster via these custom-built GUI's.