Compute Resources

Overview

El Gato was implemented at the start of 2014 and there is no planned date at this point to discontinue it.  El Gato is a large GPU/PHI cluster, purchased by an NSF MRI grant by researchers in Astronomy and SISTA.  30% of this system is available for general campus research, including the Nvidia GPU's and Intel Phi's.

Ocelote was implemented in the middle of 2016.  It is designed to support all workloads on the standard nodes except:

1. Large memory workloads that do not run within the 192GB RAM of each node can also be handled with either the large memory node or virtual SMP nodes
2. GPU's are available as a buy-in option or windfall and are now available standard on Ocelote.

Free vs Buy-In

The HPC resources at UA are differentiated from many other universities in that there is central funding for a significant portion of the available resources. Each PI receives a standard monthly allocation of hours at no charge.  There is no charge to the allocation for windfall usage and that has proven to be very valuable for researchers with substantial compute requirements.  

Research groups can 'Buy-In' (add resources such as processors, memory, storage, etc.) to the base HPC systems as funding becomes available. Buy-In research groups will have highest priority on the resources they add to the system.  If the expansion resources are not fully utilized by the Buy-In group they will be made available to all users as windfall.

Details on allocations

Details on buy-in

Test Environment

HPC has a test / trial environment as well as the primary clusters detailed below.  This environment is intended to be used for projects that are six months or less in duration and cannot be run on the production systems. Reasons for not being able to be run on the production systems include requiring root access, and hardware or software requirements that cannot be met by one of the production systems. If you have a project in mind that we might be able to support, contact hpc-consult@list.arizona.edu