Supercomputer
The term supercomputer refers to the most powerful computer systems available at any given time. The most powerful systems in the world are listed on top500.org. When working with supercomputers, we often refer to high-performance computing (HPC) since these computer systems are significantly more powerful than personal computers. Today's supercomputers are made up of a set of computers or nodes connected to each other by specially adapted networks for fast data transfer. Many nodes are additionally equipped with accelerators for specific types of computations. Such composed computer systems are also referred to as computer clusters.
Supercomputers are designed for engineers, scientists, data analysts, and others who deal with massive amounts of data or complex calculations that require billions of computational operations. They are used for computationally intensive calculations in various scientific fields such as life sciences (genomics, bioinformatics), chemistry (compound development, molecular simulations), physics (particle physics, astrophysics), mechanical engineering (structural engineering, design, fluid dynamics), meteorology (weather forecasting, climate studies), mathematics (cryptography), and computer science (data mining, artificial intelligence, image recognition, natural language processing).
Gaining Access
Information about the access procedure is usually published on the supercomputer centre website. The computer systems under the SLING umbrella use the SLING single sign-on (SSO) system. More details can be found at the Slovenian National Supercomputing Network consortium SLING and the HPC-RIVR project.
Login Nodes
In the following, we will launch jobs on the supercomputer using the Slurm middleware. The computer clusters that enable working with the Slurm system under open access are NSC, Arnes, Maister, and Trdina. To work with the Slurm system, we connect to the computer cluster through a login node. The names of the login nodes on the mentioned clusters are: