Hoffman2:Introduction

In progress...

What is Hoffman2?

The Hoffman2 Cluster is a campus computing resource at UCLA and is named for Paul Hoffman (1947-2003). It is maintained by the Academic Technology Services Department at UCLA and they host a webpage about it here. With many high end processors and data storage and backup technologies, it is a useful tool for executing research computations especially when working with large datasets. More than 1000 users are currently registered and the cluster sees tremendous usage. In February 2012 alone, there were more than 4 million compute hours logged. See more usage statistics here.

Anatomy of the Computing Cluster

What does Hoffman2 consist of?

Login Nodes

There are four login nodes which allow you to access and interact with the Hoffman2 Cluster. These are essentially four dedicated computers that you can SSH into and use to look at your files or submit computing jobs to the queue (more on what the queue is in a bit). It is important to remember that these are four computers being shared by ALL the Hoffman2 users. Doing ANY type of computing on these nodes is frowned upon. If you are:

• moving a bunch of files
• calculating the inverse solution to an EEG signal, or
• running a bunch of python iterations to extract tractography of a brain

you should NOT be doing this on a login node.

Computing Nodes

There are more than 800 computing nodes, each with 8, 12, or 16 cores and 1GB, 4GB, or 8GB of RAM per core