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Software

  • in Software
  • 7 min read

The "It Works on My Laptop" Dilemma: Managing Software with Modules

A supercomputer without software is like an engine without a car. It can be powerful, with nothing to do. Software is what gives supercomputers purpose and direction, without it they would be useless. Sometimes this software is already installed on the supercomputer and sometimes it is something that you install yourself. Regardless of how it got there, we need a way to manage it, especially if there are multiple versions of the same software.

Why is My Job Waiting? Decoding the Cluster Queue

Have you ever submitted a job just to wait for it to start, without knowing why it’s sitting in the queue? In this blog post, I’ll talk about how the queue works on a supercomputer, how to determine why your job is waiting, and some tips to wait less time for your jobs to start.

  • in Software
  • 2 min read

Conda vs Anaconda

On RCAC community clusters we deploy modules for both conda and anaconda. These are both separate distributions of the "conda" package manager. The conda module points towards the Miniforge distribution of conda (https://github.com/conda-forge/miniforge), while the anaconda module loads the official Anaconda, Inc. distribution of conda (https://www.anaconda.com/download).

Although these two distributions behave similarly, the components within them vary slightly:

VS Code on RCAC Resources

Visual Studio Code (VS Code or Code) is a popular IDE growing in usage in HPC. It is particularly useful for less-technical researchers (relative to say, Vim), because of it's remote development capabilities.