Rosalind is a bot that sends updates to a Slack channel regarding the HPC usage. It sends us regular updates that look like this:

If you want to give it a go, you need to

1. Have a webhook rosalind can use. For which you will need to create a Slack App. Creating a Slack App is very simple, and it is explained in various resources. Essentially, THIS is how your Slack Apps page should look like (you can call it anything you want, of course, and it doesn't have to be called 'rosalind'), with these permissions.

2. Add your new app to your Slack workspace (such as Meren Lab). The relevant page should look like this.

3. Copy the webhook by clicking the "Incoming webhooks" line as shown here.

4. Login to your server, and get a copy of the codebase on your server:

mkdir -p ~/github
cd ~/github
git clone https://github.com/merenlab/rosalind.git

5. Install PyYAML (used to read the config file):

python -m pip install pyyaml

6. Copy the template config and fill it with your webhook (and bot token if you want file uploads) plus other preferences:

cd ~/github/rosalind
cp config.yaml.template config.yaml
# edit config.yaml to set webhook, slack_token (optional), slack_channel (ID preferred; name ok with or without #), cluster name, quiet days, user map, and (only if you know what you're doing) usage_log_path/usage_retention_days

7. Run rosalind:

cd ~/github/rosalind
./rosalind --overall-summary-at-start

8. You can also run rosalind forever on the head node of your slurm environment using screen, so you can safely logout while it continues to send updates to your Slack environment.

We didn't think anyone would use rosalind other than us, so we didn't much effort into it. But it has been extremely usfeul for us to keep a passive eye on our HPC activity and load. So you should feel free to try it, and please reach out to us if you have any questions. If there is demand, meren promises to learn how to make rosalind and installable app, so everything on this page can be much more elegant compared to how they are right now :p