FAQ

Introduction

In our Wiki, you will find a lot of often very detailed information about working in our HPC environment. However, for beginners, it can be very challenging to find the right start.

This is where this F.A.Q. comes in handy: It is specially designed for the very beginner and links to our Wiki resources when needed.

But also our advanced users could find some of the answers helpful.

If you think, that there are some important questions/answers missing, please let us know. This whole Wiki is a work which is permanently in progress.

F.A.Q.

The very basics

• What exactly is an HPC Cluster?

An HPC cluster is a group of several high-performance computers. HPC clusters are used when the performance of one ordinary computer is no longer sufficient to perform (scientific) computations.
For comparison: An average well equipped PC has a processing unit (CPU) with 4 cores and 8 - 12 Gigabyte RAM. Our standard nodes have 24 cores with 256 GB RAM for each core. If a complete node is used to full capacity, 6144 gigabytes of RAM can be used! (A node can be seen as a single computer within the cluster)