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 (CRCD) and Pitt IT. To get started, you will need a CRCD account, with which you will use to login to Access Portals to interact with the CRCD Ecosystem.
A schematic of the process is depicted below.
Who has Access?
The CRCD-P3: Open Science Research Computing and Data Environment Usage Policy defines the scope of access. Briefly, these computing and data resources are available to all Pitt faculty, instructors, Emeritus faculty or center directors. These PIs, in turn, can request access for their students, post doctoral fellows, and staff. Access for Pitt alumni and external collaborators are possible through the Sponsored Account mechanism.
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 CRCD 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 |