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General remarks

When getting involved in supercomputing at one of the University of Bayreuth’s computer clusters as a new user, there usually appear several basic questions. Among those are which clusters are available, what are their characteristics, or how to get access. These pages cover topics of this kind and answers some frequently asked questions in order to help new users.

Basic cluster organization and use principle

First of all, there exist several computer clusters at the University of Bayreuth which are regularly replaced by newer ones in a round-robin fashion. The currently available clusters and their characteristics are listed from newest to oldest on the “Systems” pages.

A computer cluster consists of so-called nodes, which are fully operational computers with CPUs, main memory, mainboard, a hard drive or SSD, network interfaces, and its own operating system. There usually are - one or more management nodes for administration purposes, which are not accessible to users, - one or more login nodes which build the interface between the cluster and the rest of the world, - several compute nodes which perform the computations, - a high-performance network which connects the nodes, - several further hardware components such as switches or power distributors, and - software such as compilers, libraries, or application software which is available on the login and compute nodes.

The only components visible to a regular user are the login nodes. These allow users to log in, compile their own source code, and prepare and submit computation jobs. A computation job usually consists of a job script which defines the required resources and how to perform the job. By submitting this script, one can start the job, which gets a Job-ID and ends up in a job queue with the other computation jobs that wait for execution. As a handy feature, one can configure the job script to, e.g., send an email to a given address when the job starts and finishes or define dependencies between different jobs. The most basic steps to submit your first job and understand basics of software and job-handling are shown in this chapter.