Glossary

Term	Description
Access to the queues	Ability to run a job.
ARCHIE-WeSt	Academic and Research Computer Hosting Industry and Enterprise in the West of Scotland.
AU	Allocation Unit.
“Back-filling”	A method to use the computational resources in efficient way. Short parallel jobs might use (for short period of time) the nodes which are already reserved for other, large parallel job. Back filling is possible only when the queuing system managed to reserve all the required nodes yet.
Core	Refers to the part of processor which does calculations (in modern multi-core processors).
Core hour	Computing time on one core.
CPU	Central processing Unit. Traditionally CPU referred to the processor, nowadays to the processor’s core.
dm1	Data mover 1; fast connection to ARCHIE-WeSt (10Gb/s) which should be used for data transfer.
Environmental Module	The way how the software “installation” is handled. to use particular software the user needs to load appropriate module.
GPU node	The part of HPC made from Graphic Processing Unit
qpu.q	Gpu queue. The queue dedicated for calculations ran on graphic card(s).
GUI	Graphical User Interface.
Hard quota	The disk allocation which can;t be exceeded.
HPC	High Performance Computing, e.g. the practice of aggregating computing power in a way that delivers much higher performance than one could get out of a typical desktop computer or workstation in order to solve large problems in science, engineering, or business. High Performance Computer can be treated as cluster of computers.
Interactive jobs	Jobs ran on ARCHIE-WeSt with usage of software GUI. Not efficient way of using the HPC facility.
Job script	A job submission script that tells the Sun Grid Engine (SGE) system what compute nodes should be used (normal, SMP, GPU), is the job serial or parallel and what is the project ID.
Login node	Part of the HPC system which copes with login operations and sends the job to the particular compute node. Not dedicated to run any calculations.
Lustre	High performance storage. The drive from which all jobs should be launched (submitted).
Node	If HPC is treated as a cluster of computers, the node is one computer in the cluster. Each core might have several processors and multiple cores on it.
Parallel.q	Parallel queue. The queue dedicated for multi-core (parallel) jobs which will run on normal compute nodes.
Project allocation	CPU allocation per project.
Project ID	Project identifier, needs to be specified in all job scripts, otherwise the job will not run. Used to calculate the CPU usage per project (for monitoring he machine usage and reporting).
Putty	Software to connect to any remote Linux computer firm Windows Desktop.
Quota	Disk quota: disk space allocation per user.
Serial.q	Serial queue. The queue dedicated for single-core jobs.
SGE	Sun Grid Engine – the queuing system.
SL1	High priority access (via project).
SL2	Normal priority access (via project).
SMP node	Large memory node, called also fat node.
Smp.q	Smp queue. The queue dedicated for both serial and parallel jobs which require large amount or RAM per core.
Soft quota	The disk allocation which might be exceeded up to hard limit and for not longer than certain time (for example 7 days).
Submit a job	Launch a job. Send the job to the queuing system to run (once there will be enough resources).
Subscription fee	Annual payment £500 per user to allow the access to the queues (e.g. run jobs).
ThinLinc	Remote desktop software to connect to ARCHIE-WeSt.
Vizualization Server	Part of the system dedicated for extensive pre/post processing data which needs to be done graphically. The data does not need to be transferred to the desktop computer for analysis.
WinSCP	Software used to transfer the data between any Linux and Windows Computers.
X	Graphical support (for ssh).