4 High Performance Computing

Certain analysis use cases require high performance computing resources:

• big data
• parallel computing
• lengthy computation times
• restricted-use data

For analyses involving big data or models that take a long time to estimate, a single laptop or desktop computer is often not powerful enough or becomes inconvenient to use. Additionally, for analyses involving restricted-use data, such as datasets containing personally identifiable information, data use agreements typically stipulate that the data should be stored and analyzed in a secure manner.

In these cases, you should use the high performance computing resources available to emLab. emLab currently has two high performance computing servers that are managed by UCSB’s General Research IT (GRIT). These servers are named sequoia and quebracho. This section of the manual describes how to use these two servers for high performance computing.

For now, please use sequoia for general emLab computing for most projects. Quebracho is currently restricted to land use projects (e.g., land-based-solutions and projects starting with cel), so please only use quebracho if you have already been doing so and have already discussed this with Kathy or Robert. If you have any doubts about which server to use, please use sequoia. Note that sequoia does not have a GPU, but quebracho does. If you need access to a GPU and are not already using quebracho, please contact Robert and Kathy to talk about using quebracho.