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To access the DTN follow the procedures below. More information about the DTN is available here:  What is DTN? 



  • Do you have a cluster account? If not, first create one 

Click https://servicecatalog.uncc.edu/service/research-computing/high-performance-computing-research . When your cluster account is ready, please move on to the next action item. 

If you already have a cluster account, please go to the next action item.



  • How to request access to DTN interactive node (dtn.uncc.edu)?

Visit: https://servicecatalog.uncc.edu/service/research-computing/high-performance-computing-research

Please create a ticket to URC requesting access to DTN interactive node (dtn.uncc.edu)




  • Fill in the required fields and click submit. You will receive email confirmation about the ticket and its reference number. The ticket status will be notified via the email. 



Now that I have access to the DTN, how do I log in?

There are 3 main ways to transfer data from the internet using the DTN: 1) within an interactive session, 2) through a batch submission, and 3) using Globus GridFTP.

Interactive Session

You must first log in to the HPC interactive node by SSH'ing to hpc.uncc.edu . More info can be found here: How do I log in to the cluster?

Once logged into hpc.uncc.edu, you can issue the following command:

srun --partition=DTN --nodes=1 --ntasks=1 --mem=4gb --time=1:00:00 --job-name=dtn_ia --pty /bin/bash

( ...where "--time=" is set to the amount of time you think you will need on the DTN; adjust accordingly. )

Once you get an interactive session on the DTN, you can now use your favorite transfer method to download data: wget, curl, rsync, ftp, etc. More info can be found here: How do I transfer data from the internet?

Batch Submission

If you have a data file or dataset that you think will take a very long time to download, instead of logging in interactively to the DTN to initiate the download, consider creating a batch job to execute the download, and submit it to the DTN partition. Here is an example SRA Toolkit job, which uses prefetch and fastq-dump to download an NCBI data file (you can do this on hpc.uncc.edu; no need to log in to the DTN):


#! /bin/bash

#SBATCH --job-name=fastqdump_SRR8378xx
#SBATCH --partition=DTN
#SBATCH --nodes=1
#SBATCH --ntasks-per-node=1
#SBATCH --mem=4gb
#SBATCH --output=%x_%j.out
#SBATCH --time=4:00:00

cd $SLURM_SUBMIT_DIR
module load sra-tools/2.11.0
for (( i = 19; i <= 56; i++ ))
  do
  prefetch SRR8378$i
done


This will download SRA files SRR837819 through SRR837856. Save the above submit script to a file; I'll name mine "submit.slurm" for my example. Once saved, submit it to the scheduler using the command: sbatch submit.slurm


Globus GridFTP

Follow the instructions here (scroll down to "Method 2") to set up your Globus account if you would like to transfer files using GridFTP.



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