Getting Started with NRP Nautilus

Get access and log in

If you are a new user and want to access the NRP Nautilus cluster, follow the steps below.

Point your browser to the PRP Nautilus portal.
On the portal page, click on the Login button at the top right corner.
You will be redirected to the CILogon page, where you have to Select an Identity Provider.
Select your institution (for example: University Name) from the menu and click the Log On button.
- If your institution is using CILogon as a federated certification authority, it will be on the menu. Select the name of your institution and use either a personal account or an institutional G-suite account. This is usually your institutional account name (email) and a password associated with it.
- If your institution is not using CILogon, you can select Google.
We require email to be visible. If you are using ORCID as your institution, please change the email setting to make it visible to everyone.
After a successful authentication, you will log on to the portal with a guest status.
On the first login, you become a guest. As a guest, you cannot access any computing resources to run your code. You have to be part of at least one namespace (usually your research group) as a user or admin.
If you are a student, please contact your research supervisor and ask them to add you to their namespace. Once you are added to a namespace, your status will change to a cluster user and you will get access to all namespace resources.
If you are a faculty member, researcher, or postdoc starting a new project and need your own namespace —either for yourself or your research group—you can request to be promoted to a namespace admin in Matrix. As an admin, you will have the ability to:
- Create multiple namespaces.
- Invite other users to your namespace(s).
Admin Responsibilities
As a namespace admin, you will be the one responsible for
- all activity happening in your namespaces,
- keeping the user list up-to-date.
Once you are made either a user or admin of a namespace, you will need to accept the Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) on the portal page in order to get access to the cluster.
Access your namespace(s).
- If you have become a namespace admin, you can start creating your own namespaces at this time by going to the Namespaces manager section on the portal. You can add other users on the same page after they have logged in to the portal.
- If you got added to a namespace as a user, you can verify it by going to the Namespaces manager tab after logging in to the portal. You should be able to “Select your namespace” from a drop-down list.
Make sure you read the cluster policies before starting to use it.
Read the Cluster Policies
- Read and accept the NRP Acceptable Use Policy (AUP).
- Read the Cluster Policies.

Cluster access via kubectl

Nautilus is a Kubernetes cluster. You will be accessing the Kubernetes API from your laptop or desktop using the Kubernetes command-line interface (CLI) tool, kubectl.

Install the Kubernetes command-line tool, kubectl.
Login to the NRP Nautilus portal and click the Get config link on the top right corner of the page to get your configuration file.
Make sure you use the same provider and account you used to login to the portal. If you use a different provider with the same email, your account in the system will still be different and your namespaces membership will change.
Save the file as config (without any extension) and put it in your $HOME/.kube folder.
This folder may not exist on your machine, to create it execute:
Terminal window
```
mkdir ~/.kube
```
Finally, you should have the Nautilus Kubernetes config on your machine (laptop, desktop) as ~/.kube/config

Make sure you are using the correct config file.

Run the following command to list available Kubernetes contexts:

$ kubectl config get-contexts
CURRENT   NAME       CLUSTER    AUTHINFO                                  NAMESPACE
*         nautilus   nautilus   http://cilogon.org/serverE/users/XXXX     XXXX

If you have access to multiple Kubernetes clusters, you need to choose use-context nautilus by doing
Set Context
```
kubectl config use-context nautilus
```

Verify cluster access using kubectl. Run the following command on your terminal.
Get Pods
```
kubectl get pods -n <YOUR_NAMESPACE>
```
If you see the message “No resources found in your namespace” it means there are no pods in your namespace yet. This indicates that you have access to the resources of your namespace.

Use the Cluster

Read the Using Nautilus page to learn how to use the cluster.
To learn more about Kubernetes you can look at our tutorial.
Other helpful resources:
- kubectl Tool Overview and Cheatsheet
- Kubernetes Basics from Kubernetes project
- Kubernetes Official Tutorials
Please note that not all examples will work in our cluster because of security policies. You are limited to seeing what’s happening in your own namespace, and nobody else can see your running pods.

GUI tools for Kubernetes

You might want to try one of these GUI tools for Kubernetes:

Lens - Graphical user interface
K9s - console graphical user interface

Both will use your config file in the default location to get access to the cluster.