Getting Started

High-Performance Computing (HPC) is the use of groups of computers to solve computations a user or group would not be able to solve in a reasonable time-frame on their own desktop or laptop. This is often achieved by splitting one large job amongst numerous cores or ‘workers’. This is similar to how a skyscraper is built by numerous individuals rather than a single person. Many fields take advantage of HPC including bioinformatics, chemistry, materials engineering, and newer fields such as educational psychology and philosophy.

HPC clusters consist of four primary parts, the login node, head (management) node, worker nodes, and a central storage array. All of these parts are bound together with a scheduler such as SLURM.