High-performance Computing (HPC) is the use of specially-designed hardware systems (and associated software) that allow computational operations to be undertaken at higher speed than is possible with "typical" computers.
Typically, HPC systems consist of many individual compute nodes that are connected together in such a way as to make the overall system much faster at computational jobs than any of the individual nodes alone would be. Thus, the combined nodes (dozens, to hundreds or even thousands in number) can work togther to undertake tasks that would take a single node a prohibitively long time.
This relies on not only a large number of compute nodes- the way they pass data between eachother, the way they access common data, and the way the software that is run makes use of the many compute nodes, is of vital importance. So, while an individual node may be no faster than a good contemporary laptop or desktop machine, it is the overall capability of the entire system (multiple compute nodes, their interconnection, data and memory access, and optimised software) that gives the increase in performance.
Such systems are quite complex in terms of hardware, management software and maintenance, and they also require purpose-built rooms with air-conditioning, mains power conditioning and similar non-trivial support infrastructure.
However, without the sort of number-crunching capacity enabled by facilities such as eResearch SA's HPC systems, many of the problems encountered in today's research areas would not be able to be investigated.
Details coming!
Details coming!
Commercially-licensed (or paid for) software can also be installed on our systems by eRSA staff. However it is up to the user to pay for a valid license for the product. Please note that we will not install software on our systems that in any way violates a usage or licensing policy.
Upgrading of software is done based on the resources and effort required. Upgrade licenses for software are the responsibility of the user.
Custom-written user code can be installed and compiled on our systems; please note that we can only provide limited support for custom-written user code.
Details coming!
Details coming!
We make use of the Linux Operating System on our HPC Facilities and as such cannot support native Windows code.
We do not place any hard limits on HPC usage, however our HPC facilities are a shared resource and as such we ask users keep their usage to a reasonable level.
- Submission of more than 50 jobs to the queue in a single run - Requesting large amounts of wall time on a large number of queued jobs (Submitting 50 jobs to the queue and requesting 300 hours wall time per job)
This depends heavily on the type of jobs you are running and what the application you are using supports. It is best to contact the help desk if you need help selecting the best supercomputer for your job. As a rule of thumb:
Job start times vary based on a number of criteria. These include
During busy times you may have to wait 2 or 3 days for your jobs to start.
If you think your job has been queued for an excessively long time, contact the Service Desk and let us know.
Details coming!
There are two ways to find this information.
When logged-in to one of the eRSA systems, use the module avail command for an up-to-date list of installed modules on that system. Note that this must be done on each system individually. Refer here to help decide which system is most applicable to the type of job you're considering running.