Teaching and Learning Cluster (TALC)
The Teaching and Learning Cluster (TALC) is an HPC cluster created by Research Computing Services in response to requests for a central computing resource to support academic courses and workshops offered at the University of Calgary. It is a complement to the Advanced Research Computing (ARC) cluster that is used for research, rather than educational purposes. The software environment in the TALC and ARC clusters are very similar. What students learn about using TALC will have direct applicability to using ARC should they go on to use ARC for research work.
There are two types of compute nodes in the TALC cluster and are distinctly grouped into separate partitions, CPU24 and CPU32-Bigmen partition nodes, with a total of 384 cores. TALC is connected to a network disk storage system with no backup policy. Users are responsible for their own backups. Since accounts on TALC and related data are removed shortly after the associated course has finished, users should download anything they need to save to their own computer before the end of the course.
Please refer to our TALC Cluster Guide for detailed specifications.
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 TALC 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.
TALC account requests are to be submitted by the course instructor. You must have a University of Calgary IT account in order to use TALC. If you do not have a University of IT account or email address, please register for one at https://itregport.ucalgary.ca/.
If you are the instructor for a course that could benefit from using TALC, please review the TALC Terms of Use, then contact us at support@hpc.ucalgary.ca to discuss your requirements. To ensure that the appropriate software is available, student accounts are in place, and appropriate training has been provided for your teaching assistants, it is best to start this discussion several months prior to the start of the course.
If you are a student in a course using TALC, please review the TALC Cluster Guide for basic instructions in using the cluster. Questions should first be directed to the teaching assistants or instructor for your course.