The purpose of this page is to provide the new user with the bare minimum of information required to start using CHPC's facilities. Please explore the rest of the Wiki for more advanced information, as well as application-specification instructions and examples.

1. Most high performance computing (HPC) systems like CHPC's cluster use the Gnu/Linux operating system. Windows applications will not run on the system.
2. The computers that make up the HPC cluster do not run faster than a good desktop computer, nor do they usually have particularly impressive amounts of memory. The performance comes from running many compute nodes in parallel. If your application is not parallelised, it will not run faster at CHPC than on a good desktop machine.
3. The system is designed to be used in batch mode. The user prepares a job, submits it to the queue, and the system executes it when the requested amount of resources become available.
4. You can request an interactive session, which will give you access to a compute node in the cluster. Here you can compile programs, do pre- or post-processing, and check your job setup.
5. Access to the system is by means of secure-shell (ssh).
6. Data can be copied to or from the system by means of secure copy (scp) or rsync.
7. Tasks are managed with http://www.pbsworks.com/