Hopper (née Junior) is Vassar’s high-performance computing cluster. A cluster is a group of inexpensive servers running together in a specific way to act as one large parallel computer.
Clusters use specific networks and software to spread large, parallel calculations out over many servers and their available resources. To the software, many servers appear as one large set of CPUs or GPUs in one logical computer.
All of Vassar’s faculty and students are invited to try Hopper.
The Hopper Cluster currently comprises 5 computational nodes:
- Five Dell EMC nodes with 64 CPU cores (128 CPUs with threading) and 512 GB RAM per node
Hopper runs Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Linux and typical HPC software such as:
- SLURM
- OpenMPI
- FreeMPI
- R
- Python
- Gaussian
Contact hopperadmin@vassar.edu for additional software requests
Hopper features the following virtual environments (which are highly recommended for Python and R):
- Miniconda (Full Anaconda packages can be added on request)
- Docker
- Python venv
- HPC Modules
Researchers can access Hopper by using SSH either directly with a terminal application, or by using CLI/IDE tools such as Visual Studio Code and using the SSH server configuration.
For storage, Hopper has 80TB of space with the below mounted to each user:
- /home
- /work
- /scratch
Contact hopperadmin@vassar.edu
To request access to Hopper, complete the following permission form. It will be reviewed by the ACCAS Director and the Hopper Systems Administrator.
Click here to fill out the Hopper HPC Access Request Form
Please note that access to this resource was moved behind the Vassar College VPN in Spring 2023. Therefore you must either be on the campus VPN (if external to the College) or on the campus network in order to connect to this research system once you have been granted access to the system. Please see the CIS VPN Request page.
Hopper User Guide
Click here to download the Hopper Manual
Written/edited by Leah Isseroff Bendavid, based on and including excerpts from the PSC Bridges User Guide (https://www.psc.edu/bridges/user-guide) and the Weizmann Institute Chemfarm User Guide (http://www.weizmann.ac.il/chemistry/chemfarm/home).]