Getting started with the I2BC cluster
About the cluster
The I2BC cluster is a computer cluster, or HPC cluster (High-Performance-Computing). It’s composed of a set of high-speed computer servers (called nodes) that are connected together. The communication and dispatch of the workload between these nodes goes through a centralised scheduler. On the I2BC cluster, the “main” node (or “master” node) is called the Frontale and is the one you land on when you connect to the cluster.
The nodes on the cluster have different capacities (in terms of CPU, GPU and memory) but all nodes share the same configuration and have access to the same storage system.
Running your jobs on the cluster enables you to parallelise the workload, to more easily process large amounts of data and to solve complex problems at a higher speed than you would using your own computer.
Currently, the I2bc cluster uses the OpenPBS v.20 scheduler and has about 50 nodes with 20 to 96 cores and 60Gb to 1Tb of memory each.