Do you need a Supercomputing account?
There are a few questions you need to ask yourself to determine if an Office of Research Computing account is right for you:
Will your account be used for approved BYU research or for an approved class?
If the answer is "no", you do not qualify for an Office of Research Computing account.
How much work do you need to complete?
If your work is taking a long time on a desktop and you simply want to make it run faster, the Office of Research Computing is probably not the answer for you. The main benefit to Office of Research Computing systems is the parallelism involved, not the speed of an individual system; the CPU frequency (i.e. GHz) is often lower on our CPUs than a newer desktop CPU but we have substantially more cores. If you're only running one instance of your software at a time and it can't benefit from parallelism, the Office of Research Computing will probably not be of benefit to you.
If your needs are currently mostly being met by a desktop, you may be much better off upgrading your desktop CPUs and memory than you will by taking the time to learn how to use an Office of Research Computing account.
What is the deadline for your project?
It takes time to learn how to properly use an Office of Research Computing account. If your project must be finished by next week, you will almost certainly not benefit from an Office of Research Computing account. The following questions will help determine how much time it will take for you to get set up.
Do you need special software to be installed?
The Office of Research Computing maintains some software for users. It takes time to install software and it is typically only centrally installed if there is sufficient demand for it. All Office of Research Computing systems run Linux so your software must be able to run on Linux.
You are allowed and encouraged to install software yourself, subject to any licensing restrictions. If you can do this yourself, you can get up and going more quickly.
If you need help installing software or it needs to be installed centrally, add days or weeks to your project estimate. The Office of Research Computing places low priority on software installation requests; there is usually a lot going on that is higher priority such as bug reports, maintenance, etc.
For various reasons we don't use a package manager (e.g. apt, yum, deb, rpm) so your software isn't as easy for us to install as you may think it is. Docker is not supported since it is insecure by design.
Are you a "power user" of any computer operating system?
A "power user" may be defined as someone who loves computers, has some command line experience, and loves fixing things that may or may not be broken. If this doesn't describe you, it may take you a lot longer to pick up on things.
If your computer experience is limited to browsing the internet and editing documents in an office suite, you may need to add several days or weeks to the time estimate. If you are experienced with using ssh for remote connections (e.g. putty) and sftp/scp for file transfers, you may be able to figure things out in hours or a day or two.
How are your Linux command line skills?
The better your Linux command line skills (typically bash), the less learning you will need to do. If you're skilled with Linux, the only thing you'll need to learn is how to use the Slurm scheduling system. If you're a power user of another operating system but not Linux, it may take an additional few hours or days to figure out Linux.
Have you used a batch job scheduler before?
If so, great. If not, it will probably take a few hours to figure it out.
Examples
Here are some example estimates. Lots of assumptions are made that may skew the estimate high or low.
If you are currently a Windows power user:
- Learn how to use ssh, Linux, and bash: 8-16 hours
- Learn the Slurm scheduler and how to prepare batch jobs: 2-10 hours
- Install software yourself: 2-10 hours
If you're very familiar with Linux already:
- Learn the Slurm scheduler and how to prepare batch jobs: 2-4 hours
- Install software yourself: 2-4 hours
If your computer experience is mostly limited to web browsing and an office suite:
- Learn how to use ssh, Linux, and bash: several days - several weeks
- Learn the Slurm scheduler and how to prepare batch jobs: 1-4 days
- Install software yourself: several days
If you need Office of Research Computing staff to centrally install software, add a few days or even weeks depending on the complexity of the software, staff availability, etc.
Last changed on Wed Feb 13 10:35:06 2019