The University of Wyoming has an established commitment to supporting world-class research by maintaining access to resources and up-to-date tools. This mission is shared by UW Advanced Research Computing and we offer a wide range of High Performance Computing services.
High Performance Computing (HPC) is a main engines driving the advancement of scientific
research today. HPC refers to the use of powerful computers and advanced software
tools to perform complex calculations or simulations that would be difficult or impossible
on conventional computational resources.
Our resources and services can help engineers, data scientists, designers, and other
researchers solve large, and complex problems in far less time than traditional computing.
If you are a member of the UW research community, ARCC can provide you with access
to our primary HPC cluster, Medicinebow at no cost.
How will you know if If your research runs into problems that have outgrown your desktop, laptop, or primary workstation, moving your work to HPC may be an ideal solution. Signs you've outgrown your current computer include:
You're getting errors indicating you no longer have enough memory, disk space or other hardware errors. This may also result in a non-responsive computer or crashing of your computational processes/software.
You need to handle large datasets.
Your program needs to be run a large number of times (usually with alternating input data).
It takes too long to run your computations, but they could run faster in parallel (software capable of this will usually have keywords indicating their use with MPI or OpenMP).
You will need to scale your research and/or computations to much larger problem sizes.
Your computations/analysis need access to GPU acceleration that's unavailable on your workstation.
You want to free up your local machine so it's available for something else!
If any of these situations seem familiar, you can likely benefit from moving your research to HPC. Click here to request access to our HPC cluster through our service portal or e-mail us at arcc-help@uwyo.edu with any questions.
HPC is often associated with scientific research and engineering, but it can be useful across a number of fields. Some common reasons to use HPC include:
Speed and efficiency improvements - HPC allows users to perform calculations, simulations, and other tasks more easily than conventional computers. HPC users can complete tasks far more quickly, efficiently, and at a lower cost.
Capacity to handle large datasets - HPC can process and perform work on large amounts of data far more easily than your workstation. This can be beneficial in a number of growing fields, including data analysis, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.
Scalability - Users can scale their work easily to larger problems when running on
an HPC. Initially building work from an HPC makes it far easier to perform these
computational tasks on an HPC. When problem size increases, users simply request
more resources on the HPC system.
UW ARCC also offers research centered data storage options, a variety of research support software and tools, systems and end user support, and miscellaneous services to help you get your research done in a more efficient and effective way. Click here for a more comprehensive list of our services.
MedicineBow is UW ARCC's newest High Performance Computing cluster dedicated to research computing at the University of Wyoming. MedicineBow and Beartooth (ARCC's prior primary HPC cluster) are both shared services available to the entire UW research community. Our department is committed to helping researchers find the most appropriate solutions to meet their research needs. ARCC HPC clusters follows a condominium-style model of resource management.
Condo computing resources are used simultaneously by multiple users. Researchers may work with ARCC to purchase compute nodes and storage which are then installed within the cluster and managed by our system administrators. When investor purchased resources are not in use by the prioritized investor users, they are made available as a community resource and general access to investor-purchased resources can be revoked whenever an investor wishes to use their resource. Prempted jobs are automatically re-queued to ease any burden on these general users.
Our staff works to maintain an expected uptime of 98%, allowing for researchers to perform computation-intensive analyses on large data sets. ARCC HPC compute environments may be accessed anywhere, anytime over the web through OnDemand, or using SSH connectivity with UWYO two-factor authentication.
Contact arcc-help@uwyo.edu to learn how you can get access to our resources.