Quest Compute Expansion This Fall

Northwestern IT is preparing to expand Quest, the University’s high-performance computing cluster, to give researchers more shared capacity for computationally intensive work. Starting with early Fall, Quest14 nodes will support a wide range of research needs, including large-scale simulations, data-intensive analysis, artificial intelligence and machine learning, computational biology, imaging, and other workflows that depend on reliable access to advanced computing resources.

The expansion will add 60 compute nodes, each with 128 CPU cores and 512 GB of memory, along with eight high-memory nodes with one or two terabytes of memory and four new login nodes. Together, these additions will increase Quest’s total CPU core capacity by about 11 percent and expand the high-memory resources available in General Access, helping researchers run larger jobs and analyses that may not fit comfortably on standard compute nodes.

For researchers, the added capacity is intended to improve access to shared computing resources and reduce the time spent waiting for jobs to start. The new high-memory nodes will also accelerate workflows that require substantially more memory, such as genomics pipelines, image processing, large datasets, and other memory-constrained analyses. By expanding both compute and login resources, Quest14 will help support evolving research community needs across Northwestern.

For more information on accessing Quest, visit the Research Computing and Data Services's website.