HPC / ARC
Advanced Research Computing
The Advanced Research Computing (ARC) cluster is a general purpose cluster for research projects based at the University of Calgary. This compute cluster is comprised of hundreds of severs interconnected with a high bandwidth interconnect. Special resources within the cluster include nodes with large memory installed and GPUs are also available.
This cluster can be used for running large numbers (hundreds) of concurrent serial (one core) jobs, OpenMP or other thread-based jobs, shared-memory parallel code using up to 40 or 80 threads per job (depending on the partition), distributed-memory (MPI-based) parallel code using up to hundreds of cores, or jobs that take advantage of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs).
ARC is intended for processing research data classified as Level 1 or Level 2 based on the University of Calgary's Information Security Classification Standard. For Level 3 or Level 4 data, please consider our MARC cluster.
Hardware
ARC provides access to over 21,000 CPU cores and over 20 GPUs. The ARC cluster has a little over 6 petabyte of shared disk storage available across the entire cluster as well as many terabytes of local temporary storage and scratch space accessible by our compute nodes.
Available Software
Our system supports a wide range of software designed to make use of a cluster computing environment. Examples of software that has been successfully used on ARC in the past can be found on our ARC Software Pages. If you do not see what you need, please send an email to support@hpc.ucalgary.ca for availability or other options.
Accessing ARC
ARC is available to all Faculty, Staff, and Graduate Students engaged in research as well as any other UCalgary IT account holders that have been sponsored for an account.
To request access to ARC, contact us at support@hpc.ucalgary.ca