HPC / TALC
Teaching and Learning Cluster
The Teaching and Learning Cluster (TALC) is a HPC cluster to help facilitate academic courses and workshops focused on teaching HPC and highly parallel workloads at the University of Calgary. It is the educational counterpart to the research-focused Advanced Research Computing (ARC) cluster. We maintain a similar software environment between TALC and ARC to help students apply their skills from TALC to ARC should they wish to continue pursuing research work.
Student Access to TALC
All TALC students accessing TALC must have a University of Calgary IT account in order to be able to log in. Your course instructor or TA will help you get connected to TALC.
IT Account
If you do not have a University of IT account or email address, please register for one.
Attend your course or lab
Your course instructor or TA will help you get started with TALC.
Requesting Access to TALC
New TALC account requests must be submitted by the course instructor.
If you are a course instructor that would like to use TALC, please review the TALC Terms of Use and contact us at support@hpc.ucalgary.ca to discuss your course requirements. To ensure that your software requirements, student accounts, and appropriate training for TAs are in place, please contact us several months prior to the start of the course.
Hardware
The TALC cluster has a total of 612 CPU cores and 15 NVIDIA Tesla T4 GPUs. There are two big-memory nodes with a total of 2TB of memory. All compute nodes have access to hundreds of terabytes of network storage.
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. There is no backup policy on any storage on TALC and users are responsible for their own backups.
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 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