Documentation Overview
Welcome to the High-Performance Computing Core Facility (HPCCF) Documentation Site. These pages are intended to be a how-to for commonly asked questions about resources supported by the UC Davis High-Performance Computing Core Facility.
HPCCF is a core faciilty reporting through the Office of Research and supported by individual university colleges, the Office of the Provost, and the Vice Chancellor for Research.
Before contacting HPCCF support, first try searching this documentation. This site provides information on accessing and interacting with HPCCF supported clusters, an overview of available software ecosystems, and tutorials for commonly used software and access patterns. It is split into a Users section for end-users and an Admin section with information relevant to system administrators and advanced users.
Questions about the documentation or resources supported by the HPCCF can be directed to hpc-help@ucdavis.edu.
Getting Started with HPC¶
Please read the Supported Services page.
The high-performance computing model at UC Davis starts with a principal investigator (PI) purchasing resources (compute, GPU, storage) and making them available to their lab. HPCCF will assist in onboarding and providing support.
As a new principal investigator who is interested in purchasing resources, please read the Our Clusters section below to determine which clusters are appropriate for onboarding. HPCCF can assist with hardware and storage investments for condo clusters and sell fair-share priority, primary and archive storage for fair-share clusters. Please email hpc-help@ucdavis.edu with your affiliation to start the onboarding process. Resources external to UC Davis can also purchase resources by inquiring at the hpc-help email address.
For getting started with HPC access under an existing PI, please see requesting an account.
Our Clusters¶
Condo Clusters¶
An HPC condo-style cluster is a shared computing infrastructure where different users or groups contribute resources (such as compute nodes, storage, or networking) to a common pool, similar to how individual condo owners share common amenities.
Farm: Sponsored by the College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences. Farm resources can be purchased by principal investigators regardless of affiliation.
Franklin: Sponsored by units within the College of Biological Sciences, Franklin is open to PI's within the Center for Neuroscience, Microbiology and and Molecular Genetics, Molecular and Cellular Biology, and other approved collaborators.
HPC2: Sponsored by the College of Engineering and Computer Science and is open to principal investigators associated with COE.
Peloton: Peloton is open to principal investigators associated with the College of Letters and Science. Peloton has a shared tier open to users associated with CLAS.
Fair-Share Clusters¶
A fair-share HPC algorithm is a resource allocation strategy used to ensure equitable access to computing resources among multiple users or groups. The goal is to balance the workload and prevent any single user or group from monopolizing the resources.
LSSC0 (Barbera) an HPC shared resource which is coordinated and ran by HPCCF. LSSC0 is ran with a fair-share algorithm.
How to ask for help¶
Emails sent to the HPCCF are documented in Service Now via hpc-help@ucdavis.edu. Please include your name, relevant cluster name, account name if possible, and a brief description of your request or question. Please be patient, as HPCCF staff will respond to your inquiry as soon as possible. HPCCF staff are available to respond to requests on scheduled university work days and are available from 8:00 am to 5:00 pm.
Contributing to the documentation¶
This site is written in markdown using MkDocs with the Material for MkDocs theme. If you would like to contribute, you may fork our repo and submit a pull request.