Welcome to Turing

As opposed to using a single lab computer to process your data, you can connect to the Turing HPC cluster. The cluster is built using many nodes with a variety of purposes. When you send a job to the cluster, it is often completed using multiple physical computers in the cluster. Jobs are processed in a “wide” manner as opposed to “tall”, in which many large jobs are run and completed quickly simultaneously as opposed to small jobs that individually take a long time to complete. Thus, the cluster is highly recommended for operating on large quantities of data (for example over 100 GB of data), and is sometimes the only viable hardware for completing a job (think 10 TB of data). Turing’s hardware specifications can be found here.

Many users across WPI’s campus, across departments, submit jobs to Turing. To ensure everyone’s jobs can be completed in as efficient a manner as possible, a scheduler organizes how jobs are executed. Thus, to interface with Turing, a job script is set up to instruct the scheduler on what resources are needed, and then Turing determines how to execute it among all the currently running jobs. Users connect to Turing through the login node and send their job scripts through the scheduler to be run automatically in the queue.