BRIC resources
Computing
Researchers involved in research projects at BRIC can be provided with a Microsoft Azure Virtual Machine for data analysis and other computing needs.
Virtual machines can have up to 8 CPUs, 32 Gb of memory and 12 GPUs (112 Gb of memory).
They come pre-installed with the most popular neuroimaging software (
full list of pre-installed software)For more information, contact Paul Greening.
For analyses or simulations requiring more computing power, university staff can also request access to the university’s high-performance computing cluster(s) (HPC).
The school of psychology owns a multi-user 64-thread Linux workstation with 2 GPUs, DeepSim, managed by Andy Wills.
For more information and request access, see this page
Azure virtual machines
This document contains instructions for setting up and accessing your Azure VM on different platforms:
VM-UserGuide-v6.docx
Overview
All computing resources for BRIC are hosted in Microsoft’s Azure Cloud, charged on a “pay as you go” basis, it is therefore essential your research VM is running when required and shutdown/deallocated at all other times. There are four key steps in accessing and using your VM.
Your VM needs to be activated
You need to be on the UoP network directly or via VPN
Connect/login to your active VM
When your work is complete your VM needs to be shutdown and deallocated
The options of how to do this from Windows, Linux and Mac systems are outlined in the sections below.
At the end of this document is a summary of Azure commands for quick reference.
Managing a VM from Windows
Start VM from Web browser
Start VM from Windows command line
Pre-requisites
Connect to your Azure Account
Start your VM
Stop and deallocate your VM
Connect to your VM - Command line
From a windows command line (not PowerShell)
From a windows Terminal Emulator (PuTTy)
Powershell script to Start, connect to and stop your VM (Command line)
The script sshAzureVM.ps1, provided in the BRIC GitLab repository, allows you to start a BRIC Azure virtual machine and connect to it in a Powershell command window through SSH (and X window forwarding), all in a single click. You should first have installed Azure Powershell modules and connected to your Azure Account for the script to work without error.
Before using the script, edit it by replacing the Resource Group, VM name, IP address and username on the following lines with your own information:
$ResourceGroupName = "RG-BRIC-RESEARCHER-XXXX"
$VMname = "vm-bric-researcher-Xxxxx"
$IPaddress = "XX.XXX.XX.XX"
$UserName = "xxxxxxx"
You can run the script from a PowerShell terminal by simply typing:
./sshAzureVM
(assuming your current location is the folder containing the script)
Alternatively, you can create an executable shortcut that can be pinned to the Windows task bar:
In Windows explorer, navigate to the folder that where the shortcut will live
Right-click and select: New/Shortcut
In the “Item location” box, enter the following:
powershell.exe -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File "[path]\sshAzureVM.ps1"
where [path] is the path to the location of the script.
You can pin this shortcut to the task bar or Start menu
Note
The first connection to the VM using this script will start the VM and connect to it through SSH. Any additional connection using this script will open a new Powershell window and connect to the already running VM. Closing these additional Powershell windows will not shut down the VM, but closing the first Powershell window will close all other open windows and shut down the VM.
Note
To launch applications with a graphical interface (e.g. FSL) from the VM, you must have an X window server, such as VcXsrv, running on your Windows machine.
Connect to your VM – Desktop Environment
Managing a VM from Linux
For additional information, and specific instructions for accessing Azure VMs on Linux and running simulations, see the Computational modelling Lab’s Simulations page.