The Star HPC Cluster is a computing facility designed for a variety of research and computational tasks. It combines advanced computing **nodes** and a high-speed **storage system** with a suite of **software applications**.
SLURM (Simple Linux Utility for Resource Management) is our chosen job scheduler and queueing system that efficiently manages resource allocation, ensuring everyone gets the right amount of resources at the right time.
SLURM (Simple Linux Utility for Resource Management) is our chosen job scheduler and queueing system that efficiently manages resource allocation, ensuring everyone gets the right amount of resources at the right time.
Apptainer (formerly Singularity) is also a major application on the cluster. Apptainer is a containerization platform similar to Docker with the major difference that it runs under user privileges instead of `root`. This platform is enhanced by NGC (NVIDIA GPU Cloud) which provides access to a wide array of pre-built, GPU-optimized software containers for diverse applications. This integration saves all users a lot of time as they don’t need to set up the software applications from scratch and can just pull and use the NGC images with Apptainer.
The cluster also supports various software applications tailored to different needs: Python and R for data analysis, MATLAB for technical computing, Jupyter for interactive projects, and OpenMPI for parallel computing. Anaconda broadens these capabilities with packages for scientific computing, while NetCDF manages large datasets. For big data tasks, Hadoop/Spark offers powerful processing tools.
## Hardware
### Login Node
### Compute Nodes
* Two Apollo 6500 Gen10+ HPE nodes, *each* containing 8 NVIDIA A100 SXM GPUs.
Our storage system contains of four HPE PFSS nodes, collectively offering a total of 63TB of storage. You can think of these four nodes as one unified 63TB storage unit as it is a **Parallel File System Storage** component. These nodes work in parallel and are all mounted under **one** mount point on the gpu nodes only (`/fs1`).
## Our vision
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Our heart is set on creating a community where our cluster is a symbol of collaboration and discovery. We are wishing to provide a supportive space where researchers and students can express their scientific ideas and explore unchanted areas. We aim to make the complicated world of computational research a shared path of growth, learning, and significant discoveries for the ones that are eager to learn.
