Overview
The Nova cluster is the primary high performance computing solution for research and education at ISU. It is available to users from every academic discipline at the University.
Equipment
The cluster currently consists of:
- 330+ compute nodes with over 38,000 CPU cores
- 200+ GPUs
- 200 TB of memory
- 2PB of high speed data storage
- High-speed networking
New components are added on a regular basis to ensure access to the latest technology. For in-depth hardware details, see the Nova Hardware page.
Access to the Cluster
There are three access tiers on the cluster – sponsored, community, and instructional.
- The Sponsored access tier consists of research groups that have purchased hardware for the cluster. Buying hardware is optional, but users with sponsored access will have higher job priority and more generous resources than community users. The purchased hardware is added to the pool of compute nodes accessible to all researchers. Research groups can purchase compute nodes or storage using the Nova Cluster Node and Storage Purchase Form.
- The Community tier users are researchers that have not purchased hardware for the cluster. While community users have lower priority access to compute nodes and and less data storage than sponsored users, they do have sufficient resources for testing and proof-of-concept work.
Community users can request access to the cluster using the HPC Cluster Access Request form.
- The Instructional tier users is students and instructors associated with a class that is using the cluster for teaching. Instructional users get access to the instruction queue hardware that is reserved for instructional use.
Instructors can request access for their class using the HPC Cluster Access Request form.
Logging In
Once your access request has been approved, you can log in to the cluster. There are a few common ways to log in:
Nova OnDemand
The easiest way to access Nova is with Nova OnDemand. Just point your browser to https://nova-ondemand.its.iastate.edu. From the menu, select Clusters->_Nova Shell shell window on the head node. Or you can request a full graphical desktop for running graphical applications.
SSH
You can use an SSH client to connect to the Nova head node, nova.its.iastate.edu, using your ISU NetID. The first time you try to connect to the head node over SSH, the system will check if you have second factor authentication enabled for HPC. If not, the system will send you an e-mail with the instructions for setting it up.
Slurm Job Scheduler
To use the cluster, a user generally submits job requests to the Slurm workload manager which assigns jobs to run on the appropriate compute nodes. Most jobs are run in batch mode without human interaction. Users can use the Slurm Script Generator to create a batch job script.
Users can also run jobs interactively on the command line over SSH, or using the graphical interface of Nova OnDemand. Slurm uses a fair share scheduler to ensure that access to resources is fair for all.
Software
The cluster runs on Linux. There are thousands of research software packages available, including both open source and proprietary commercial applications. Research IT staff are available to help build and integrate packages as needed. Users can access the repository using the environment module commands.