High Performance Computing (HPC)

Visit HPC

Go to ncsu.edu/hpc to create a project

For projects that require…  

  • Massively parallel computing
  • Thousands of core*hours
  • Scaling to hundreds of cores with dedicated message passing network
  • Scaling to 168 cores with dedicated low latency network
  • Hundreds of Batch jobs
  • GPU computing

Some Data Science projects may involve compute intensive parts.  Hence many of the Data Science resources have been integrated into the HPC environment. Thousands of cores at the HPC center are available to the NCSU community.  Users can run jobs interactively (on specially designated nodes) or by batch submission.  Currently all HPC projects have capability to run jobs using up to 128 processor cores up to 48 hours and smaller jobs up to a week. These limits are frequently updated… so these should be considered as the minimum capability available.

The HPC resources also include nodes with attached GPUs and a set of nodes available for general use with InfiniBand interconnect for message passing (which enables good scaling for high core-count and communication intensive parallel jobs).

Getting an HPC Account

Self Service Web App: Go to main page then click on the big red “Get Access” button.

How do I log in to the HPC system?

Windows

Use PuTTY to connect to the HPC system via SSH. PuTTY can be downloaded from here.

Once downloaded, create a connection with the username being your Unity account name and the address being login.hpc.ncsu.edu. When prompted for a password, use your Unity account password.

MAC/Linux

Use the Mac or Linux terminal to connect to the HPC system via SSH. Your username and password are your Unity account credentials. 

To connect, open a terminal and type: ssh unityid@login.hpc.ncsu.edu