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sapelo2-boilerplate
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notes, sbatch scripts, and Claude Code rules for running work on
UGA's HPC cluster. written from things that broke first.

Start here

• Getting started — basics: login etiquette, storage, interact, sbatch.
• Getting started — tips & tricks — arrays, seff tuning, /lscratch, shell setup.
• Claude Code setup — the CLAUDE.md ruleset, and why each rule exists.
• Claude Code — tips & tricks — session survival, frozen-terminal recovery, statusline, effort levels.
• CLAUDE.md ruleset — the raw rules.
• sbatch templates · Storage topology

Conventions

• Job I/O in /scratch/$USER/. Never /home. /scratch purges at 30 days.
• Inside sbatch: source activate env, never conda activate. Fresh sbatch shells have no conda init.
• GPUs: L4 (24 GB) before A100 (80 GB) unless the model needs it. L4s are almost always idle.

Rationale + failure modes: the ruleset.

Session architecture

flowchart LR
    L[local] -->|ssh<br/><small>+ vpn if off-campus</small>| G[login node]
    G -->|interact| C[compute node]
    C --> K[claude]
    K -.->|sbatch| H[batch compute nodes]

Claude Code's bash runs wherever the shell that launched it runs. Start interact with enough resources for the full session — long time, large memory, GPU if compiling something interactively — then claude from inside.

No venv activation needed before claude; envs get activated inline in bash calls or in sbatch headers. Claude itself submits and manages sbatch jobs, tuning resources against sinfo in real time.

tmux is optional — useful for splits or covering SSH drops (start it on the login node before interact), but it won't save a Claude session from interact walltime expiry.

What's universal vs cluster-specific

Most of this is GACRC-specific (partitions, QOS, module names, /work/<lab>). Portable parts:

• Post-submission health check (15–30 s after sbatch)
• Many small jobs over one large one
• source activate vs conda activate in batch shells
• Embedding pipeline sanity checks (shape, pairwise correlation, dead dims)
• Reuse-and-resume pipeline design

Universal agentic research practices (skills, session hygiene, cowork conventions): agentic-research-toolkit.

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Source: github.com/ChenHsieh/sapelo2-boilerplate