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, as well as storage space for today's data-intensive research.

The two compute clusters that ITS-RC offers are Longleaf and Sycamore. Both clusters use SLURM, a job scheduler for Linux systems, to allocate resources to users for performing computations. A job is a user-created task that is submitted to the cluster, where it is put in a queue with other jobs as it waits for the requested resources to run. Longleaf is built for high throughput computing (HTC), where jobs require a single compute node. Sycamore 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 provides a browser-based graphical interface for submitting jobs and accessing files.

On this website you can find resources on requesting access to and using ITS-RC's compute clusters. If you have any questions, please email us at research@unc.edu.