Computer Science Enclave On Quest
The Computer Science (CS) Enclave on Quest is a pilot computing allocation designed to support the research needs of the Computer Science Department in the McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern. The CS Enclave provides priority access to GPU and CPU resources, along with shared storage, on Quest, Northwestern’s high-performance computing cluster.
Eligibility
All Computer Science faculty and members of their research groups are welcome to join the CS Enclave.
How to Access the CS Enclave
Computer Science faculty and members of their research groups can apply for access to the CS Enclave by filling out the Quest Join an Allocation Form and entering b1218 as the allocation name.
Compute and Storage Resources
Quest Overview
Housed in the University Data Center, Quest supports a broad range of computational workflows across many domains. The system hosts over 1200 compute nodes and a variety of powerful GPUs for accelerated computing.
The data is hosted in a parallel file system that is accessible from all nodes through a high-speed InfiniBand network fabric. See the Quest Technical Specifications and the Quest User Guide for more information.
Compute Nodes
The CS Enclave provides priority access to 4 GPU and 2 CPU nodes:
- Two GPU nodes, each with 4 NVIDIA Tesla H100 (80GB SXM5) cards, 64 cores provided by Emerald Rapids Processors, and 1 TB memory
- Two GPU nodes each with 4 NVIDIA Tesla A100 (80GB SXM4) cards, 64 cores provided by Intel Ice Lake Processors, and 512GB memory
- Two CPU Nodes with 64 Intel Ice Lake Processors and 256 GB RAM
Quest uses the Slurm workload manager for job scheduling. Slurm is constrained to ensure that only Enclave users have priority access to the Enclave nodes. Priority access places jobs at the top of the queue for these nodes.
While resources are not in use by CS researchers, jobs of up to 48 hours in length from other users may land on the nodes. See example scripts for submitting jobs to GPU and regular (CPU-only) nodes for the CS Enclave on GitHub.
Storage Resources
The CS Enclave includes 10 TB of shared storage on Quest. The directory, /projects/b1218, is available to anyone who is a member of the b1218 allocation.In addition to the shared b1218 directory, all Quest users are provided with an 80 GB home directory. This directory is secured to only the user.
Every CS Enclave user may also apply for a 5 TB individual scratch directory for storing temporary files. To apply for scratch space, fill out the Quest scratch space application.
Support
Get help. Users can request help via a support ticket or a consult. Help tickets can be created by sending an email to quest-help@northwestern.edu. Consults can be requested by completing the consult request form.
Documentation and tutorials. CS Enclave users should look to the Quest User Guide for tutorials and documentation. Users can also watch how-to videos for step-by-step guidance on using Quest.
Training. Research Computing and Data Services hosts regular workshops on Quest and other computational topics. See the workshop schedule.