New: Academic Computing Drop-in Sessions
Academic computing drop-in sessions are now run by members of our team on Wednesday afternoons! Head to our drop-in info page for details & schedule....
Knowledge Base
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Reading Academic Computing Cluster Service
Description
The Reading Academic Computing Cluster (RACC) is a Linux cluster which provides resources for interactive research computing and batch jobs submissions to the University of Reading staff and students.
The cluster consists of login nodes and a larger number of compute nodes. On a typical cluster, login nodes are used only for preparing and submitting batch jobs. Here, we provide several load-balanced login nodes, equipped with multi-core processors, large memory and fast network connection to the research data storage volumes, such that they can also be used for interactive research computing, such as data analysis and visualization, or code development and testing.
In batch mode the tasks are described in a script and submitted to the scheduler, to be run on one of the compute nodes without further user intervention. The compute nodes provide over 500 CPU cores for serial and parallel batch jobs. The default time limit for a batch job is 24 hours, but when it is justified, running longer batch jobs is also possible. When justified by the project requirements, it is also possible to use compute node allocation for interactive processing.
In the future, approximately 300TB of local scratch storage will be provided.
A comprehensive list of installed software can be found here.
How to access
The RACC can be accessed by connecting to cluster.act.rdg.ac.uk:
ssh cluster.act.rdg.ac.uk
Costs
The majority of cluster resources are available free of charge, subject to fair use policy. Details of this policy will follow. Dedicated paid-for resources can be purchased and integrated with the cluster.