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QuickStart Guides

QuickStart Guides are documents that give a short overview of a topic, mostly comprised of links to more detailed documentation elsewhere on the web site. The available QuickStart Guides are listed below and in the menus to the left.

General QuickStart Guides

  • QuickStart Guide for New Users

    The QuickStart Guide for New Users is a collection of links to pages covering topics of interest to researchers who have just obtained a WestGrid account, such as choosing the most appropriate WestGrid system, logging in, working interactively, programming, using installed software and submitting batch jobs.

QuickStart Guides to WestGrid Facilities

The WestGrid computing facilities are comprised of a diverse set of resources. The QuickStart pages referenced below each give a description of one particular machine (or set of related machines), highlighting some of the features that distinguish it from other WestGrid resources and giving links to further information about how to work with that particular system. They are intended to be read by new WestGrid account holders and by current users considering whether to start using a part of WestGrid that is new to them. Although a few comments are given here about the roles of the various machines, please see the Computing Facilities page for an overview.

Storage sites

Computational clusters deployed since 2009

A variety of computational resources were acquired in 2010, including Breezy, which is intended for large memory jobs (including OpenMP parallel programs).  Hermes is a capacity cluster appropriate for serial computing, complemented by Nestor, which intended for distributed parallel computing.  As of this writing (2010-11-16), the large Grex and Lattice clusters are still undergoing initial configuration and testing, but, are included here as they are among the machines available for Resource Allocation Committee awards in 2011.

Computational clusters deployed in 2009

These clusters share many architectural features. They all have Infiniband networking between nodes so can support distributed-memory parallel processing. They have 8-core nodes with 16 GB of RAM, so, can support small shared-memory parallel jobs or serial jobs with memory requirements that go beyond what is available on the older Glacier cluster. Orcinus is intended for jobs that require access to many processors, but, do not require high performance storage or access to large storage volumes.  Checkers can be used for jobs with moderate storage requirements and Bugaboo for those that require large and/or high performance storage systems. A few of the Checkers nodes are equipped with graphics processors for visualization and experimentation with computation on general purpose graphics processors.

Pre-2009 machines for computation

Although these older machines still have significant computational capabilities, you might like to consider these only if you encounter congestion on the newer machines mentioned above.

Clusters for serial or low-demand parallel computing

Updated 2011-11-09