Head Node
The server you log into when connecting to acropolis.uchicago.edu is what we refer to as the head node or login node. This server is a Dell R920 consisting of “Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E7-8891 v2 @ 3.20GHz” CPU’s with a total of 40 cores or 80 computational threads and 2TB of RAM. This is a reasonably powerful machine. You are welcome to run applications requiring a few cores directly on the head node. Jobs requiring a large amount of CPU and RAM should be submitted to the job scheduler and distributed on the cluster nodes. If you need to run multiple instances of an application please utilize the compute nodes.
Cluster (or Compute) Node
The Acropolis cluster consists of 32 compute nodes. The compute nodes are Dell M630’s. Each compute node consists of “Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2690 v4 @ 2.60GHz” CPU’s with a total of 28 cores or 56 computational threads and 250GB of RAM. In order to utilize the resources on the compute nodes you must request resources from the job scheduler. Some applications such as Matlab, R, Stata launched from the menu in a VNC session will assist you with the request for resources on the cluster nodes. More complex applications which are capable of scaling across multiple compute nodes or MPI communication will require a submit script. Example submit scripts can be found on Acropolis the folder /share/qsub_examples.