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IRMACS High Performance Computation

ClusterOne of the IRMACS Centre's main focus is the support of computational tools in the support of intersdisciplinary research. As part of this support IRMACS provides its user community with access to two key computational resources:

  • A dedicated resrouce allocation on the RCG Colony computational cluster
  • A dedicated resource allocation on Compute Canada infrastructure

If you have questions or concerns about using IRMACS computational resources, please email help@irmacs.sfu.ca

IRMACS Computational Cluster

As of June 2014 the IRMACS Centre cluster had been integrated with the Colony Cluster operated by the Research Computing Group at SFU. The hardware components of the IRMACS nodes remain the same (80 Intel Xeon CPUs, 2 GB/core). IRMACS users have priority access to the equivalent of 80 cores on the Colony cluster. Data storage for IRMACS users on the colony cluster has been aquired as well. Many commonly used software packages are installed on the Colony Cluster and all of the key software packages that were on the IRMACS cluster have been installed. Open source software or software purchased by researchers can be installed on request.

For more information on utilizing the IRMACS allocation on the Colony cluster, including information on the software installed and how to submit jobs, please refer to the IRMACS computational cluster support documentation.

For more information on what motivated the integration and some of the changes you will notice between Colony and the old IRMACS configuraiton, please see the IRMACS Cluster to Colony Cluster migration documentation.

General purpose documentation in using the colony cluster is available here.

IRMACS Compute Canada Resource Allocation

In order to support its users in the use of large scale computational science, IRMACS maintains a Resource Allocation on WestGrid/Compute Canada infrastructure. The IRMACS Compute Canada resource allocation provides IRMACS users with priority access to 200 core years of computation and 20 TB of backed up storage. For more information on using the IRMACS Resource Allocation on WestGrid/Compute Canada infrastructure please refer to the IRMACS Compute Canada support page.