August 2025
Dear Users, we are now in the 'Acceptance Testing' of the £2.5M Comet HPC system. At this critical period, the RSE-HPC team must prioritise this testing work and we apologise that this may mean we are unable to deal with your queries as quickly as we would like. Please bear with us, the introduction of Comet will lead to a great improvement in the HPC service we provide to you in the coming months.
You can find more about the current progress with Comet on this page: Comet HPC Progress
Not all types of compute or workflow can benefit from the use of HPC facilities. We provide a description of the main types of compute facilities you can access at Newcastle University, and which of those facilities are the most suitable for various types of computational work.
The ways you can request a new HPC project, and how funded and unfunded projects differ.
In addition to the normal methods of connecting shown below, the Comet HPC facility offers the ability to connect to interactive applications such as R Studio, Jupyter and Matlab (amongst others). For more information see our Open On-Demand and interactive applications guide in the Advanced Topics section.
This section explores basic HPC concepts, explains how they differ to desktop computing environments, the common software tools which are used and how they can benefit different types of compute requirements.
Understanding the concepts presented in this section will allow you to make more effective use of our HPC resources.
If you have never used Slurm before, this section will show you how to write a very basic batch job. You will want to understand the basics in this section first, before you move on to more advanced Slurm job types.
For more types of job customisation, see our Advanced Slurm Job Optimisation page under the Advanced Topics section.
If you have reached this far you should be able to log in to our HPC facilities, navigate around the various filesystems and launch most common types of Slurm jobs.
For further information, including optimising your Slurm settings, guidance on specific software packages, containers and interactive desktop sessions, please see our Advanced Topics section:
These pages have recently been changed or updated within the Getting Started section:
| Connecting to HPC (On Campus) | 2025/09/16 08:56 | John Snowdon |