What is it?
Unity is a High Performance Computing cluster that provides users access to a large and powerful computing system to handle large amounts of data at high speeds with parallel performance.
The Unity cluster is a collaborative, multi-institutional effort located at the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC). The cluster is under active development and supports primarily research activities focused on scientific computing. Users may use interactive sessions with popular interfaces (RStudio, JupyterLab, etc.) or powerful job scheduling tools (e.g., SLURM) to submit batches of jobs in parallel across the significant resources of the entire cluster. The cluster currently supports workflows which can be implemented via the command line as well as those using RStudio, JupyterLab, MATLAB, Mathematica, and VSCode.
For more information please refer to the Unity documentation.
Who can use it?
All MHC faculty are welcome to request access to the cluster. Students interested in accessing Unity must go through a faculty supervisor.
LITS anticipates several types of users:
- Exploratory Users
- These individuals may be first time users or interested in learning more about what HPC services can do for their teaching and research.
- Exploratory Users have direct access but do not manage sub accounts for student projects.
- Users who “just need a bigger laptop” to run software, like Jupyter, MATLAB, Mathematica, and RStudio, may benefit from an Exploratory or Moderate user account.
- Moderate Resource Users
- Moderate resource users have regular ongoing computing needs.
- These accounts allow faculty to supervise student projects and moderate research student access.
- High Resource Users
- These individuals routinely use an unusually large amount of Mount Holyoke’s allowable resources.
- The HPCC advisory committee will meet from time to time to review resource use, and the committee may recommend that persistently high resource users seek additional external funding to permit long-term use at this level.
How much does it cost? There is currently no cost to faculty to get access. The Math/Stat department and Data Science program have co-sponsored Mount Holyoke’s access to Unity for an initial trial period. Users who routinely use an unusually large amount of the total allowable resources will need to seek external funding to support their research long-term.
How do I get it?
Use the "Request access to Unity" button on this page to access the request form.
After you submit your request, a member of the LITS Academic Technologies team will reach out to initiate your access to Unity.
Notable limitation: Faculty access is granted for a period of 1 semester (or summer) at a time. Users will be contacted at the end of each semester to renew their access if needed.
Hours/Availability
LITS does not support this product directly, but we have a formal agreement with the vendor to provide support.
This support includes extensive documentation, office hours, and a user community on Slack.
Requests for access to Unity will be processed during regular business hours when the College is open.
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