====== DIFA-OPH Cluster Generalities =======

The Physics and Astronomy Department (DIFA) hosts a parallel computing infrastructure directly accessible to its staff members. This infrastructure is made up of three different groups (or islands) of computing nodes with different hardware features and target usage:

  *** BladeRunner**: a set of compute nodes targeted to low-parallelism jobs (with hostnames bldNN)

  *** Matrix**: a set of compute nodes targeted to massively parallel jobs (with hostnames mtxNN)

  *** GPU**: a set of compute nodes with Graphic Processing Units besides standard CPUs (with hostnames gpuNN)

For a more detailed description of the hardware features and access policies of the different groups of nodes see the [[oph:cluster:resources|Resources]] section.

The [[:oph:cluster:access]] to the infrastructure> is provided by **frontend servers**, that can be used to connect and transfer data to the cluster using the standard protocols ''ssh, scp, rsync''.