By Matt Howard [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
What is High Performance Computing?
Are your models taking a couple days to run? A week, or more? Is the data you're employing in your research too large to manage on your lab equipment? Your work may benefit from the use of large scale compute clusters available through University IT's Research Computing group.
Not sure where to begin?
To learn more about these services and how they can be employed for social science research, you can contact Vijoy Abraham.
High Performance Computing at Stanford
ITS has created a tiered system of shared compute environments, known collectively as FarmShare, for use by Stanford-affiliated researchers which IRiSS has leveraged extensively. The primary HPC clusters are FarmShare and Sherlock.
FarmShare
FarmShare is available to all SUNet ID holders and is intended for students to be able to test and refine models without the large expenditures involved with HPC computing in the cloud. More information is available at the FarmShare wiki.
Sherlock
Sherlock is reserved for faculty-sponsored projects and therefore is a more limited resource. Sherlock servers have two high-RAM nodes as well as GPU clusters which can be very useful to R and other statistics users. More information is available at the Sherlock wiki.
More information
More information about these environments, technical specifications, how to connect and use, and more can be found at Stanford ITS services.
