[Argus] Getting Started

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 by 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.

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Operating systems offered in Argus

Argus offers VMs with the following operating systems:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.3
• Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
• Windows 7
• Windows 10

Different Sizes of VMs

Argus is offering VMs with different sizes

For GPU intensive computations, Argus also offers vGPUs on VMs.

Different types of users

Each Argus machine can be used by multiple users (one at a 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.