Argus vs Artemis
Not all computing tasks are appropriate for HPC (Artemis); the University’s HPC system is designed for batch-oriented rather than interactive computing. It excels with workloads that are highly parallel (i.e. can processed by multiple CPUs simultaneously), or which require very large amounts of memory (2TB and beyond). There are many workloads that do not fit this model and which cannot make use of Artemis’ multi-node or high-memory capabilities. Many of these tasks still require computational capability that exceeds that available in common laptop or desktop computers.
Argus seeks to address these gaps through the phased implementation of a research computing platform upon which virtual research environments, especially graphical virtual research desktops can be built and made available. Below image shows University’s different research computing services.
Operating systems offered in Argus
Argus offers VMs with the following operating systems:
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 7.3 - 7.5
- Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
- Windows 10
Different Sizes of VMs
Argus is offering VMs with different sizes
...
Type
...
vCPU
...
RAM
...
vGPU
...
Small
...
4
...
16GB
...
2
...
Medium
...
8
...
32GB
...
4
...
Large
...
16
...
128GB
...
8
Different types of users
Each Argus machine can be used by multiple users. Only one user can use/access a VRD system at any given point in time. The level of access for users can be different. Currently there are two type of users:
- Normal user – A normal user can login to an Argus machine and use resources but doesn’t have permissions to make any changes to the system (e.g. install applications).
- Power user – A power user has higher level of access to the machine. They can install/uninstall applications on the machine and make changes.