Getting Started

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.

• What Are My Compute Options?

The ways you can request a new HPC project, and how funded and unfunded projects differ.

• How Do I Register?
• Do I Have to Pay?

Please be aware that Rocket, our current High Performance Computing cluster, is end of life and will be replaced in Summer 2025 by a new cluster, named Comet. This means that you would need to migrate your workloads to the new system if you start working on Rocket now.

Currently, the entire Rocket /nobackup filesystem should be considered at-risk. It is beyond end of life and should only be being used to hold code and data which is currently active and being used to run jobs. There is a very real possibility of failure of this end-of-life filesystem, and this means that you should be prepared to lose code and data at any point. For research data, we strongly recommend you apply for storage on RDW https://services.ncl.ac.uk/itservice/core-services/filestore/research/ the first 5TB are free and the storage is mounted on the Rocket login nodes. Application Form

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.

• Connecting to HPC - On Campus
• Connecting to HPC - Off Campus
• Transferring Data

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.

• Basic HPC Concepts - Why is it different? What can it do? What can it not do?
• Introduction to software modules - Loading software on HPC
• Introduction to Slurm - What are these tools?
• Data and HPC Filesystems - Where should I work? Where should I store my data?

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.

• Writing Your First HPC Job

• Available HPC Resources
  • Resources and Partitions - How are resources organised?
  • Resources and Partitions - Rocket
  • Resources and Partitions - Comet

• Typical HPC Job Types
  • Simple sequential job
  • Single large (memory and ram) job
  • Long running serial job
  • Task array job

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:

• Advanced Topics

These pages have recently been changed or updated within the Getting Started section: