New User Information

Overview

Welcome to the TAMU Supercomputing Facility web site. This page is intended to quickly guide new users to:

• Learn about our resources
• Request an account on our resources
• Getting started on our resources
• Find out about training available for our resources
• Know where to find more information about our resources

Resources

We make available several resources to our users:

• Eos, our IBM iDataplex cluster that runs Linux on nodes with the Intel Nehalem and Westmere processors. There are also 4 nodes with NVIDIA Tesla GPUs. This is currently our main computational resource.
• Hydra, our IBM Cluster 1600 that runs AIX on nodes with Power5+ processors.
• Lonestar, UT/TACC's Westmere-powered cluster.
• Several Linux workstations for pre- and post-processing needs.
• A disk based storage archive for backing up your files that are produced or used on our resources.

Requesting an Account

The computer systems managed by the Supercomputing Facility are available for use to university faculty, staff, and students who require large-scale computing capabilities. Access to and use of such systems is permitted only for academic research and instructional activity. All other use is strictly prohibited without the approval of the Supercomputing Facility's steering committee. Consult our policies page for more information.

Please visit our account applications page to begin applying for an account on our systems. Consult our account allocation policy for more information.

Once your account is approved, you can activate your available accounts at the Account Management System (AMS). Online documentation for AMS is available here.

UT/TACC Lonestar Accounts

Go here for further instructions for obtaining an account on the UT/TACC Lonestar cluster.

Getting Started

After activating your accounts, consult our guide for accessing our resources. If you are new to working in a Unix or Linux environment, consult our introduction to UNIX and our guide to basic Unix commands.

Once logged into our resources, consult the README file in your home directory for an introduction to our systems. For more information, please consult our user guides for our systems.

Training, Documentation, and Consulting

New users are strongly encouraged to attend our shortcourses which are typically offered during the spring and fall semesters. We also provide and maintain a set of user guides with more in-depth information about using each system and other documentation that should be useful for all of our systems. If you need assistance with using our systems, our helpdesk is available during normal business.