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Your first time using a supercomputer like Sol can be intimidating, but it does not have to be. This guide will get you started with the basics. If you run into problems or need additional help, we hold regular weekly office hours.
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HPC: Short for “High Performance Computing” it refers to a group (or a cluster) of interconnected computers designed for parallelism across many computers at once. Publicly these are often called “supercomputers”.
Node: A single machine in a supercomputer. This will be either a physical machine or a virtual machine.
Login Node: A node intended as a launching point to compute nodes. Login nodes have minimal resources and should not be used for any application that consumes a lot of CPU or memory. This is also known as a “head node”.
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Using the login nodes for computing work will result in temporary penalties on the account, e.g., do NOT install Python packages or connect to vscode on a login node. |
Compute Node: Nodes intended for heavy computecomputing. This is where all heavy processing should be done.
Job: Work assigned to be done on a compute node. Any time a compute node is assigned a job is created.
Memory (RAM): Short for “Random-Access Memory“. This is used for the amount of memory that each calculation or computation requires in order to execute and complete successfully. The term “memory“ is not used for disk space. This is another main component that defines a node.
CPU: Short for “Central Processing Unit”, also called a core. This is one of the main components that defines a computing device, such as a node.
GPU: Short for “Graphic Processing Unit”. This is a specialized piece of hardware that can enable and accelerate certain computational research.
Scheduler: The application on our end that manages and assigns (allocates) compute resources for jobs. The scheduler used on the ASU Supercomputers is called Slurm.
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