Frequently Asked Questions

Questions and Answers:

Question: When will the HPC environment go online?

Answer: The Cardinal Research Cluster is currently being built and secured. It should be available for research computing in late spring or early summer. To request an account or CPU time, please follow the links to the left.

Q: How do I request an account?

A: Fill out this online form. This account is for faculty researchers or students working on faculty-sponsored research projects. All requests go through an approval process. Requestors will be notified of their application status within two (2) business days.

Q: Is my data backed up?

A: Home directories are backed up. Scratch directories are not. Every user has one home directory and at least one scratch directory. Files in the scratch directories may be periodically deleted when space is an issue, i.e. when more than 90% of the disk is full. You will be given advanced notice before files are deleted so that you can move them off the cluster.

Q: Do I have unlimited storage space?

A: There is a quota of 10 GB for faculty and 1 GB for students on your home directory. There is currently no quota on your scratch directories, although this may change if storage space conflicts arise.

Q: What consulting services do you offer?

A: We offer general consulting on research computing problems. Free open consulting is available for up to 8 hours of consulting, and free extended consulting may be available for up to 160 hours of time. You must apply for extended consulting, and the approval of your application depends on the availability of a consultant with suitable expertise for your research problem. Further information on our consulting services is available here.

Q: Why can't I access the CRC from off campus?

A: The CRC is behind the campus firewall, so users must access it either from an on-campus computer or using the UofL vpn. When requesting a CRC account, users are automatically given a VPN account.

Q: How do I use the CRC to run my program?

A: You must submit a job to the queuing and scheduling system to run your program on the compute nodes. The job submission page describes that process.

Contact us at it-hpc@louisville.edu with any questions or for additional information.

Research Computing.  It’s happening here.