In this article you will learn how to access the Nvidia DGX Cloud resources available from the University.
Compute Request Form wip
Getting Started:
To begin, log into NVIDIA AI Enterprise Base Command using your University email (Web SSO)
Once you successfully log in, select the University At Albany (SUNY) as your organization, and then select your team. If you do not have a team, please reach out to ITS to add you to your lab's team. You may still access resources, but your lab's data and workspace will be unavailable until you are placed into their team.
Generating an API Key
In order to upload your data and even use the nvidia command line, you will need to generate an API Key. This key allows you to log into your workspace as yourself, so it is important to not lose it or give out to people.
Once you have selected a team and logged in, you will be on the Base Command homepage. On the left hand side, select 'BASE COMMAND' and from the dropdown, select 'Dashboard' to bring yourself to the overview of the system.
Scroll to the bottom right and click 'Setup' in the section labeled 'Download CLI and Generate API Key.
On the next page, click 'Generate API Key'. Save this key to a text file for easy access on your machine. If you lose your key you can generate a new one on this page again. Next you will install the Nvidia CLI
Installing the Nvidia CLI (Command Line Interface)
Next, download the CLI according to your system specifications. To find your system specifications, press the Windows key and type 'System Information'.
Your system information on a Windows machine will look like this. In this case, this is a 64 bit installation of Windows since it is x64-based.
Next select the appropriate download of the CLI and install it.
Once the install is complete, you will configure the terminal and check if it has installed correctly.
Configuring your Terminal
Next you will need to configure your terminal such that you can upload your data in a neat and usable format. Press the windows key and type 'Windows PowerShell' to open a powershell terminal. Powershell has many similarities to a linux terminal that you may be familiar with from accessing exiting University resources but looks different due to syntax. You can still use commands such as 'cd' and 'ls' just like you can in linux.
In your terminal, call the following to check if Nvidia CLI has installed correctly:
ngc --version
This should return the version of the CLI that you installed. Your username should appear here as well. You can change directories by invoking:
cd C:\Users\your_username\
To list the contents of your directory, invoke the command 'ls'.
Next, you will configure your ngc such that you can upload your data to your workspace and access it within a job. To begin, invoke:
ngc config set
You will be prompted for your API key that you generated earlier. You can copy (ctrl+c) and then paste (ctrl+v) in your powershell terminal to submit your API key.
Next it will prompt you for your CLI output type, select ascii by typing in:
ascii
If you entered a different option or accidentally skipped this entry, you can invoke 'ngc config set' again to pick your choices again. Hitting enter without any input will skip the prompt, so you do not need to re-enter your API key unless you need to.
Next you will be asked to enter your organization, enter the following:
University at Albany (SUNY)
Next it will ask you to enter your team name. This should be your lab team in which you will be working in. Lastly the terminal will prompt you for 'ace'. Enter the following in order to set your architecture:
univ-of-albany-iad2-ace
If done successfully, you will see something similar to the following:
You should see your username and lab name in the appropriate spaces. Congrats on setting up the terminal! You are now ready to upload your data.
Uploading Data
From your computer:
In your powershell terminal, navigate to where your data is stored. To do this you can change directories via:
cd \Users\your_username\path\to\your\data\
You can also obtain this path by opening a file explorer and copy-pasting the address at the top into your terminal.
Make sure your data is not zipped or archived. If your data is zipped or in .tar format, it will upload as such and will not be as accessible on the cloud. Unzip/untar your data before uploading. The option under --source should be the file or folder that contains your files. The --desc option has a descriptor and name section. Lastly the --share option will designate to which team you want to upload the data to if you are a part of multiple teams.
ngc dataset upload --source <dir> --desc "my data" <dataset_name> --share <team_name>
An example command to upload a series of csv files in a folder containing them labled 'world happiness' to the team awan_lab, would look like the following:
ngc dataset upload --source world_happiness --desc "csvs of world happiness data ranging from 2015 to 2019" world_happiness --share awan_lab
From your lab folder:
uhhh figure this out, maybe install nvidia CLI somewhere on lmm?