Nodes and Partitions

The cluster, or HPC (High Performance Computer), is composed of several computers called nodes.

Types of nodes

Each node has a different purpose, but the roles of interest for a user are two:

• A login node, also called submitter, is normally the only directly accessible by the users. It lets them submit and manage their jobs, but does not perform any computation. On our cluster, the address of the login node is 192.168.0.102, which is aliased to submitter;
• A compute node is in charge of executing the jobs submitted through the login node.

Normally, a user logged into the login node can submit one or more jobs to be executed by compute nodes. When they do so, the jobs are assigned to available compute nodes by the job scheduler on the login node.

Partitions

Cluster's nodes are further split in three partitions based on user's groups:

Partition	Accepted groups	Time limits per job	Nodes with/without a GPU	Default/Max memory per job	Max CPUs per node	Max nodes per job
admin	sudo	unlimited	0/1	unlimited	unlimited	unlimited
department_only	sudo, department, group_leaders	3 days (72 hours)	6/15	8 GB/unlimited	unlimited	8
multicore	everyone	6 hours	0/2	8 GB/unlimited	unlimited	1
students	everyone	1 day (24 hours)	3/8	8/32 GB	8	1

You can check your group using the groups command on the frontend or the submitter.

Output of the groups command

If you're a student with username <user>, probably the output would look like this:

<user> docker

If you're a group leader with username <user>, the output would look like this instead:

<user> docker group_leaders