Big Picture OverviewΒΆ
The University of Pittsburgh provides its research community access to high performance computing and data storage resources. These systems are maintained and supported through the Center for Research Computing and Data (CRC) and Pitt IT. To get started, you will need a CRC account, with which you will use to login to Access Portals to interact with the CRC Ecosystem.
A schematic of the process is depicted below.
Definitions
- Client -- this is your computer or internet-connected device
- Access Portal -- one of several remote servers used to submit jobs to the high performance computing clusters or to perform data management operations
- CRCD Ecosystem -- the total footprint of the CRC infrastructure, including high performance computing clusters, data storage systems, networking equipment, and software
Available Resources
| Cluster Acronym | Expansion | Description of Use Cases |
|---|---|---|
| MPI | Message Passing Interface | For tightly coupled parallel codes that use the Message Passing Interface APIs for distributing computation across multiple nodes, each with its own memory space |
| HTC | High Throughput Computing | For genomics and other health sciences-related workflows that can run on a single node |
| SMP | Shared Memory Processing | For jobs that can run on a single node where the CPU cores share a common memory space |
| GPU | Graphics Processing Unit | For AI/ML applications and physics-based simulation codes that had been written to take advantage of accelerated computing on GPU cores |