FAQ

This site is currently under development!

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)

Am I permitted to work on the cluster?

Basically, every student or scientific staff member has the right to work on the HPC cluster, as long as the computations are scientifically legitimated (which of course includes the progress of the students' education).

Nonetheless, there are a few things to consider. There are three common use cases, which we will briefly describe:

• You are writing your Bachelor / Master / PhD thesis. In this case, it is very likely that you are already part of a Unix groups. Just tell your thesis advisor that you need to take your work to the cluster and create a request (see next question).

• You take place at a seminar which happens to work with the cluster. In this case, you don't have to do anything. Your university lecturer will take care about everything regarding the HPC login and you will get provisional login data. But after the course, you won't be able/permitted to keep using them!

• You are not writing on your thesis, you are not taking place in a seminar and you are not part of a workgroup. But you want to use the HPC anyway. If this is the case, please contact us at hpcsupport@uol.de. Either you will be transferred to a fitting group (after consulting the corresponding professor) or you could get an own workgroup. Either way, we will very likely find a solution that fits your needs.