Farm

Farm is a Linux-based supercomputing cluster for the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences (CA&ES) at UC Davis. Designed for both research and teaching, it is a significant campus resource primarily for CPU and RAM-based computing, with a wide selection of centrally-managed software available for research in genetics, proteomics, and related bioinformatics pipelines, weather and environmental modeling, fluid and particle simulations, geographic information system (GIS) software, and more.

Farm Hardware

Farm is an evolving cluster that changes and grows to meet the current needs of researchers, and has undergone three phases, with Farm III as the most recent evolution.

Farm III consists of 60 parallel nodes with up to 64 CPUs and 256GB RAM each in low/high, plus 27 "bigmem" nodes with up to 128 CPUs and 2 TB RAM each in the bml/bmh queue. All Farm III bigmem and newer parallel nodes and storage are on EDR/100Gbit interconnects.

Hardware from Farm III is still in service; Farm I has been decommissioned as of 2014, and Farm II has been decommissioned as of 2025-12.

Farm also has multiple file servers with over 5.3PB of storage space in total.

Access to Farm

All CA&ES researchers are entitled to free access to the following resources via publicgrp, which is automatically granted to every user of Farm:

• The low (low priority/requeue) partition, which has ~100 nodes with a combined ~15,000 CPUs, ~64 TB of RAM, and ~50 GPUs. Jobs in low are limited to a maximum runtime of 7 days and will be killed and requeued if the resources are needed for jobs in the high partition.

In addition to this, each new user is allocated a 20 GB home directory. If you want to use the CA&ES free tier, select "CA&ES free tier" from the list of sponsors here.

Additional usage and access may be purchased by contributing to Farm III through the node and/or storage rates or by purchasing equipment and contributing through the rack fee rate.

Contributors always receive priority access to the resources that they have purchased within one minute with the “one-minute guarantee.” Users can also request additional unused resources on a “fair share” basis in the medium or low partitions.

Farm Administration

Farm hardware and software are administrated by the HPC Core Facility Team.

Current Rates

Current Farm rates can be seen here.

Bring your own equipment (BYOE):

Equipment may be purchased directly by researchers based on actual cost. Equipment quotes are available upon request. If you BYOE, then the racking rate of $375 per year per rack unit for five years will apply. If you require custom equipment not available through Hippo, you can start a discussion with Adam Getchell or HPC@UCD.