Making summer plans? ACCRE can help
We know many of you are working hard to keep up with a fluid situation and are faced with a variety of new challenges. Some of those challenges include how to create opportunities for your staff and students to stay busy and productive despite being off campus. If you are still in the planning process of what to do with your researchers and students between now and the end of the summer, we want to make sure you are aware of the resources at your disposal here at ACCRE. All of our resources can be accessed remotely and do not require a VPN setup or DUO account. This week we will have our scheduled downtime, but come Friday you can:
- Sign-up for basic training for the ACCRE cluster. We continue to offer our bi-weekly courses for staff, faculty, and students who would like to learn about VU’s HPC resources. The three classes are “Intro to UNIX”, “Intro to the Cluster”, and “Intro to SLURM”. These are available online and registration links are found here.
- Experiment running virtual environments on the cluster. One of the strongest new trends we see are researchers building virtual environments and deploying them as jobs in the cluster. The virtual environments are attractive because the user can install needed software components without elevated privileges. Knowing how to do this well speeds up your research and helps your staff/students develop very desirable skills. ACCRE’s Documentation section is a great place to start.
- Go interactive with the Visualization Portal. Have an application that needs to run on a desktop with gobs of RAM? CPU? both? Run interactive apps on the cluster via the portal.
- Arm yourself with Big Data tools. ACCRE hosts a 46 node Big Data cluster equipped with JupyterHub, HDFS, and Spark. It is free to use by anyone with a VUNetID (i.e. does not require an ACCRE account or subscription to ACCRE services). Tips on how to get started are here.
Cluster accounts are available for free to PIs for evaluation purposes and to faculty for instructional purposes.