Connecting to Deucalion
Warning
Deucalion is only available to valid user accounts! If you try to access the system without prior authorisation, you will be incurring crimes punishable by Portuguese and European law.
Geographic Access Restriction
Access to Deucalion is limited to European countries. Connections from outside Europe are blocked.
What this means for you user
If you're connecting from European countries, no action is needed. If you're traveling outside Europe, you won't be able to reach Deucalion until you're back within a covered country, or you connect through a VPN/proxy with an exit point in an approved country. If you believe you're in a covered country but still can't connect, contact support — your IP address may not yet be correctly recognized as belonging to that country.
Using SSH
Once you have completed the steps to Setting up SSH key pair you can connect using the ssh client.
Once you have completed the steps to Setting up SSH key pair you can connect using the ssh client command:
ssh -i <path-to-private-key> <username>@login.deucalion.acnca.pt
where you need to replace <path-to-private-key> with the path to the file
which contains your private key and <username> with with your own username.
To simplify the login procedure you can define a shorthand alias for the connection parameters (user, host, private key). You may add the following declaration to the SSH user configuration file on your system (~/.ssh/config, create it if it does not already exist):
Host deucalion
Hostname login.deucalion.acnca.pt
User <username>
ForwardAgent no
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_ed25519
You will then be able to connect to Deucalion simply with:
ssh deucalion
Once you have completed the steps to Setting up SSH key pair you can connect using the ssh client command:
ssh -i <path-to-private-key> -o Ciphers=aes256-gcm@openssh.com -o MACs=hmac-sha2-512-etm@openssh.com <username>@login.deucalion.acnca.pt
where you need to replace <path-to-private-key> with the path to the file
which contains your private key and <username> with with your own username.
To simplify the login procedure you can define a shorthand alias for the connection parameters (user, host, private key). You may add the following declaration to the SSH user configuration file on your system (~/.ssh/config, create it if it does not already exist):
Host deucalion
Hostname login.deucalion.acnca.pt
User <username>
ForwardAgent no
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_ed25519
Ciphers aes256-gcm@openssh.com
MACs hmac-sha2-512-etm@openssh.com
You will then be able to connect to Deucalion simply with:
ssh deucalion
Open PuTTY, specify the Host Name login.deucalion.acnca.pt and port 22
In the tab Data, enter your username to access Deucalion
In the tab SSH > Auth click Browse and select the private key generated in the step Generate your SSH keys
You will be prompted for the passphrase of the SSH key which is the one you
entered when you generated the key. When you connect for the first time, you
will also be asked to check the host key fingerprint of the system and need to
type yes in order to accept it. The fingerprint of the Deucalion login nodes are
listed in the table below. Please make sure that the host key fingerprint
matches one of these.
| Key type | Fingerprint |
|---|---|
| ED25519 | SHA256:AMzlfN8g69jQGN26hYJqtag20d2CYG2Xg16VXmJv5V0 |
Upon successful connection you will see the welcome banner followed by a message of the day:
8888888b. 8888888888 888 888 .d8888b. d8888 888 8888888 .d88888b. 888b 888
888 Y88b 888 888 888 d88P Y88b d88888 888 888 d88P Y88b 8888b 888
888 888 888 888 888 888 888 d88P888 888 888 888 888 88888b 888
888 888 8888888 888 888 888 d88P 888 888 888 888 888 888Y88b 888
888 888 888 888 888 888 d88P 888 888 888 888 888 888 Y88b888
888 888 888 888 888 888 888 d88P 888 888 888 888 888 888 Y88888
888 .d88P 888 Y88b. .d88P Y88b d88P d8888888888 888 888 Y88b. .d88P 888 Y8888
8888888P 8888888888 Y88888P Y8888P 888 8888888 8888888 888888 Y88888P 888 Y888
Last login: Mon Jun 30 11:39:15 2025 from xxx.xxx.xx.xx
Greetings <username>
Welcome to the Portuguese EuroHPC supercomputer, *please* read documentation before use:
https://docs.deucalion.acnca.pt/
The following scripts are now available for user reference:
1. Home Quota Check: quotahome
2. Lustre (projects) Quota Check: quotaprojects
3. Slurm Billing Information: billing
Run these scripts directly to get up-to-date information on
your storage usage and job-related billing.
Computing time
The available hours in your project can be seen in the user portal (projects tab in the sidebar) or by running billing in any of the login nodes. To check the disk quota in all your projects you can run quotaprojects. To get the quota information of your home you can run quotahome. These commands are also present at login time.
Node exclusivity
In Deucalion all nodes are exclusive (apart from the ooda partition and the GPU partitions). This means that if you only request one core from a CPU machine you will still get billed the whole 48/128 (ARM/x86, respectively). In the GPU nodes resources are shared (unless you set #SBATCH --exclusive in your batch script).
Login nodes (Advanced usage)
For High Availability reasons, Deucalion has four login nodes. The Host Name login.deucalion.acnca.pt points automatically to one of the login nodes.
We recommend that you connect to login.deucalion.acnca.pt and not directly to a specific login node, but it is possible to do, and it may be necessary for certain advanced use cases.
Helpful commands
These commands are specific to Deucalion:
Billing
billing gives you information about your slurm accounting:
[username@ln03 ~]$ billing
┏━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━┓
┃ Account ┃ Used (h) ┃ Limit (h) ┃ Used (%) ┃
┡━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━┩
│ F20240001a │ 113656 │ 200000 │ 56.83 │
│ F20240001g │ 0 │ 2000 │ 0.04 │
│ F20240001x │ 231 │ 10000 │ 2.31 │
└────────────┴──────────┴───────────┴──────────┘
Accounts that end in `a`/`x`/`g` give you access to the ARM/X86/GPU partitions, respectively.
Project Quota
quotaprojects gives you information about how much disk space you have in each of your project's folders:
[username@ln03 ~]$ quotaprojects
┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┓
┃ Directory ┃ Size ┃ Files ┃
┡━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┩
│ /projects/F20240001 │ 723.59G / 15.00T │ 1600357 [no limit] │
└─────────────────────┴──────────────────┴────────────────────┘
Home quota
quotahome gives you information about the usage of your home folder. The home folder is restricted to a very low number of files so make sure all the conda/pip environments are created in your project folder.
[username@ln03 ~]$ quotahome
┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┓
┃ Directory ┃ Size ┃ Files ┃
┡━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┩
│ /home/username │ 2.20G / 25.00G │ 16541 / 25000 │
└───────────━━───┴───━━━──────────┴───────────────┘