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Overview

About the URCF♯

The University Research Computing Facility (URCF), established in 2013, provides high-performance scientific computing and secure storage of protected health information to both the Drexel community and other universities in the Philadelphia area.

The current supercomputer, Picotte, is the result of a combined investment funded by both Drexel and the National Science Foundation's Major Research Instrumentation program. Named in honor of Susan La Flesche Picotte, the first Native American to earn a medical degree and a Drexel alum, Picotte consists of 4,224 compute cores and 48 Nvidia Tesla V100 GPUs capable of running at a theoretical peak speed of 355 TFLOPS and is housed in a state-of-the-art 1,600-sq.ft. data center. Picotte supercomputer is supported by a combined effort from both URCF and Drexel University IT. In addition to system administration, URCF provides training and research consultation activities for all users.

Danger

NO DATA BACKUPS AT ALL♯

URCF DOES NOT PROVIDE ANY FORM OF BACKUP FOR USER AND RESEARCH GROUP DATA. DATA BACKUP IS THE RESPONSIBILITY OF EACH USER OR GROUP.

We do, however, have snapshots of data taken once a day. If you have accidentally deleted data, please contact urcf-support@drexel.edu to attempt recovery.

For some suggestions on backing up data, see Backup Solutions.

Danger

Security advisory regarding Python/Conda/pip/PyPI♯

Numerous malicious packages have been uploaded to PyPI and Conda repositories. These malicious packages may be named slightly different from legitimate packages, i.e. they are using a technique called "typo-squatting". Please double check your command lines before installation. If you think you may have installed a malicious package, please contact urcf-support@drexel.edu

Getting Help♯

Please contact URCF support via the issue tracking system:

urcf-support@drexel.edu

This ensures a record is kept of your request and all work done for it. When contacting us, please provide the following information:

  • If this error was encountered during a job, provde the job ID
  • Describe the series of steps you performed that show the error
  • Please copy and paste, or type, the exact error message you received. You can also attach a screenshot of the error to the email.
  • Tell us what you expected to happen instead of the error and explain what you are trying to achieve.
  • Please provide a list of any files that are related to this problem. For example, a path to your job script, data set, software, etc.

See also: Frequently Encountered Problems

Getting Started♯

Picotte♯

General♯

Other Online Documentation♯