Overview

Oscar is Brown University's high performance computing cluster for both research and classes. Oscar is maintained and supported by Center for Computation and Visualization (CCV).

Please contact [email protected] if there are any questions on Oscar.

Accounts

If you do not have an Oscar account, you can request one by clicking the following link:

Anyone with a Brown account can get a free Exploratory account on Oscar, or pay for priority accounts.

More details can be found at the .

Individuals external to Brown can get access to Oscar by having a sponsored Brown account. Please work with your department to for any external collaborators.

Authorized users must comply with the following Brown University policies:

• .

• .

Hardware

Users can run their computing-intensive and/or long runtime jobs/program in Oscar to take advantage of high performance computing resources there, as highlighted below:

• 2 Login nodes

• 8 PB of storage

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.2 (Linux)

Please refer to the details at.

Scheduler

Hundreds of users can share computing resources in Oscar. such as cores and GPUs.

Users should not run computations or simulations on the login nodes, because they are shared with other users. You can use the login nodes to compile your codes, manage files, and launch jobs on the compute nodes.

To allow users sharing access to Oscar, there are limits on the maximum number of pending and running jobs a user account may have/submit:

• 1200 for a priority account

• 1000 for an exploratory account

Software

• Operating systems of all Oscar nodes: Red Hat 9.2

• More than 500

• CCV Staff install software upon user requests or help users on software installation

Storage

Oscar has 8 PB of all-flash storage from VAST, which provides high-performance access to storage. Users have ~/home, ~/scratch, and ~/data directories as their storage with quota in Oscar. Please refer to the details at .

Access and User Accounts - User accounts are controlled via central authentication and directories on Oscar are only deleted on the request of the user, PI, or departmental chair.

Files not accessed for 30 days will be deleted from your ~/scratch directory. Use ~/data for files you wish to keep long term.

Users can from and to. In particular, users can

Connecting to Oscar

Oscar users can connect to Oscar by

Maintenance Schedule

• Non-disruptive Maintenance:

  • non-disruptive work, including software changes, maintenance, and testing

  • may occur at any time

Unplanned Outage

• During Business Hours:

  • Send email to . A ticket will get created and CCV staff will attempt to address the issue as soon as possible.

• During Non-Business Hours:

User and Research Support

CCV staff support for researchers seeking help with statistical modeling, machine learning, data mining, data visualization, computational biology, high-performance computing, and software engineering.

CCV staff provides tutorials on using Oscar for classes, groups and individual. Please check for upcoming trainings and office hours.

CCV provides short videos (coming soon) for users to learn as well.