Getting access

Eligible LJMU staff and students (see Policies) wishing to obtain an account on Prospero should submit a ticket to the HPC section of the LJMU IT Helpdesk, to request the creation of an account.

Per the usage policy, research collaborators at external institutions with a genuine need to use Prospero may also obtain an account. They must first register with LJMU as an honorary visiting academic or honorary visiting student, after which their LJMU sponsor may request the creation of a Prospero account for them via the helpdesk.

Logging on

Access to the terminal on the gateway node(s) is via SSH. New users should use the address

prospero2.ljmu.ac.uk

The old gateway, prospero.ljmu.ac.uk is only for legacy users. As a security measure, Prospero uses a non-standard SSH port (10022), therefore this port must be specified via the -p argument, e.g.

ssh ITSusername@prospero2.ljmu.ac.uk -p 10022

A more elegant solution is to add a code snippet to your .ssh/config in which you can specify that this port should always be used when connecting to Prospero:

Host prospero2.ljmu.ac.uk
    User ITSusername
    HostName prospero2.ljmu.ac.uk
    Port 10022

SSH config files can be used to specify many useful settings, as explained in the manual man 5 ssh_config.

Migrating to the new operating system

Over the summer of 2026, Prospero’s hardware will migrate to a newer operating system, and the use of more capable back-end infrastructure servers that will deliver superior performance. This is a major upgrade that will be performed in stages. In effect, a second cluster will be created based on the new operating system, using a separate gateway prospero2.ljmu.ac.uk and an entirely new home space. Compute nodes will be migrated from the old operating system to the new one in batches. They will cease to be accessible to SLURM partitions on the original gateway, and will become accessible to those on the new one.

Users will need to create a new working environment on the home space at prospero2.ljmu.ac.uk. Necessary libraries can be requested for central installation by Alces, by submitting an ITS helpdesk ticket. Any compiled codes will need to be recompiled against the new versions of libraries, using an updated compiler suite on the new partition. We recommend using the Intel OneAPI suite (and if necessary the openmpi library) by loading the appropriate module:

module load intel-oneapi-compilers/2025.3.2
module load openmpi/5.0.9/intel-oneapi-compilers-2025.3.2

An important change that users should be aware of when using prospero2 is that batch queue jobs submitted via SLURM should use invoke their executables with the srun command rather than mpirun. We have found that using the latter can result in #SBATCH configuation values not being passed to the job.