Do I need HPC
Do I Need High Performance Computing?
There are two reasons that you may want to use HPC resources. The first and most obvious is that your computer tasks take too long. You may also have a task that some specialized software would make much easier. Both of these possibilities are examined in more detail in the following paragraphs.
If you have research computations that take so long that you feel they are slowing your research, then you may want to explore the possibility of using Research Computing’s HPC resources. There are two ways of using more advanced hardware to speed up your computing projects. If you have a single job that is so large that your desktop machine can not finish in reasonable amount of time, if at all, then you will want to look into a medium or fine grained parallel solution. If you have a job that runs in a relatively short amount of time, but you need to run many instances of the task, you should consider a coarse grained or grid solution. These ideas are explored in more detail at Which hardware platform should I use?
Perhaps you have a research task and the idea of writing the code from scratch is just too daunting. Research Computing supports many research software packages. Some of these run on your desktop and others run only on specialized hardware, for a full listing see our What Software is Available? page.