We are excited to announce the launch of the redesigned RCAC Documentation Website — a unified, searchable hub for everything you need to use Purdue's high-performance computing resources. The new site is built around three goals: find information fast, stay current automatically, and learn as a community. Whether you are a first-time user or an experienced researcher, here is what is waiting for you.
In the context of computing, preemption refers to the act of stopping or pausing one process to allow another process to run, and we say that a task, X, preempts another task, Y, when X pauses Y to allow itself to run. We can use this concept of preemption in an HPC environment to maximize the utilization of the resources in the cluster by allowing low priority jobs to be preempted by higher priority jobs since this allows us to be lenient with the resource limitations placed on the low priority jobs.
On RCAC community clusters we deploy modules for both conda and anaconda. These are both separate distributions of the "conda" package manager. The conda module points towards the Miniforge distribution of conda (https://github.com/conda-forge/miniforge), while the anaconda module loads the official Anaconda, Inc. distribution of conda (https://www.anaconda.com/download).
Although these two distributions behave similarly, the components within them vary slightly:
Story: One user is running lots of jobs on Bell, each with large resource request.
Visual Studio Code (VS Code or Code) is a popular IDE growing in usage in HPC. It is particularly useful for less-technical researchers (relative to say, Vim), because of it's remote development capabilities.