Frequently Asked Questions

How do faculty members register their labs with the Ahalama Committee?

The Ahalama cluster is freely available to affiliates of the Faculty of Medicine. These computational resources are to be used for Biomedical Computation (loosely defined). Faculty members can register their labs by sending an email with the subject “Register my lab on Ahalama” to gershon.kunin@biu.ac.il

Registered faculty members will in turn approve applications for user accounts for their lab members.

How do I get a user account on the cluster?

Request an account by sending an email with the subject “Open a student account on ahalama” to gershon.kunin@biu.ac.il

Please include a username, e-mail address, physical address, phone number, and PI name. If your PI is not a registered member, he/she will need to register your lab.

Your PI will need to approve your account. The systems administrators will create your user account. You will then receive a confirmation message and login instructions.

Why is Ahalama behind a firewall?

If you are logging into Ahalama from an on-campus location, you are behind the firewall, and you may SSH directly to ahalama.md.biu.ac.il. If you are logging into Ahalama from an off-campus location, you are outside the firewall, and you may not SSH directly to ahalama.md.biu.ac.il.

The main reason for having the firewall is to avoid security compromises, and protect your data. Ultimately, this allows us to help you get your research done. That's what Ahalama is really all about.

How do I get through the firewall?

Accessing the Ahalama cluster from an off-campus location requires you to first get behind the firewall. This is done by logging into an independent computer on-campus using SSH with the firewall password. Once you are logged into the on-campus computer you may SSH to ahalama.md.biu.ac.il with your ahalama password.

The firewall ruleset blocks essentially all network traffic into or out of the cluster. Specific connections, namely incoming ssh/scp/sftp and http, are allowed to authorized users. Outgoing connections (smtp, ssh, http, etc.) are blocked by the firewall.

See firewall access for details and step-by-step instructions.

Why is there no back-up of Ahalama?

The Ahalama cluster is a high performance computing computer, and not a storage device. Lost or deleted data is not recoverable, and it is the responsibility of all user to back-up their own data. If you like you can set up your own back up service to periodically download your data.

I need a software or library that is old or missing on the cluster. Can you install or upgrade packages for me?

Yes, please contact gershon.kunin@biu.ac.il If you do not hear back from us within 1-2 business days, then please try again.