INTRODUCTION FOR NEW USERS

ITS Research Computing (ITS-RC) provides world-class computing and data infrastructure as well as other technology tools and capabilities to support the research needs of faculty, staff, students, and collaborators. Our goal is to provide state-of-the-art environments and services supporting the highest level of multidisciplinary research. ITS-RC serves its users primarily through its Linux based compute clusters that allow for higher levels of computing power than a personal computer. Compute clusters are different from personal computers as their primary purpose is to work with large amounts of data and/or to do large amounts of computing. The two compute clusters that ITS-RC offers are Longleaf and Dogwood. Both clusters use SLURM, a Linux based job scheduler, to allocate resources to users for performing computations. A job is a user-created script that is submitted to the cluster where it is put in a queue with other jobs as it waits for allocated resources to run. Longleaf is built for high throughput computing (HTC) where jobs require a single compute node. Dogwood is built for high performance computing (HPC) where multiple nodes and CPUs are used to complete a job. Accessing these compute clusters can be done by using a command line interface (CLI) where Linux commands are used. Longleaf can also be accessed through Open OnDemand (OOD), which allows users to use a browser to run jobs and access files on Longleaf and provides a more graphical experience for the user. On this website you can find resources on how to request access, access, and use ITS-RC's compute clusters. If you have any questions, please email research@unc.edu.