HCC is launching its newest cluster, Swan, for general use by the University of Nebraska community. Swan expands HCC's computing resources greatly, having nearly 3-4 times the computing power Crane's hardware provided while occupying less space and consuming less energy.  Swan was made possible by investments from the UNL Office of Research and Economic Development and the Nebraska Research Initiative.

What is Swan? 

Swan is HCC's latest addition to provide Nebraska researchers with high-performance computing resources. Swan consists of 144 worker nodes with 2 CPUs/56 cores per node and nominally 256GB of RAM, 2 nodes with 2TB of RAM, and 12 GPU nodes with two NVIDIA T4 GPUs each. Swan will have the same directory layout as earlier clusters,/home,/work, and/common, with the/work filesystem having a total of 5,200 TB of Lustre scratch space. Swan is also expected to expand in the near future to add additional hardware (in particular GPU nodes). 

How do I access it? 

Access to Swan is similar to Crane.  You can ssh to swan.unl.edu using your existing HCC credentials.  For data transfers, swan-xfer.unl.edu may be used for rsync/scp; a Globus endpoint, hcc#swan, is also provided.  Swan’s OpenOnDemand interface is available at swan-ood.unl.edu. 

What is different on Swan? 

Compared to Crane and Rhino, the general environment should be quite similar. 

 Open OnDemand 

Just like Crane and Rhino, Swan will have an Open OnDemand interface to provide a web based interface to access the cluster, submit jobs, and manage your files. 

SLURM scheduler and Software 

Swan will continue to utilize the same SLURM scheduler as Crane and Rhino, with most job scripts from either resource able to work on Swan. A large majority of the software available on Crane is also installed and available to use on Swan.  Some existing packages on Crane may not initially be available on Swan.  If you require particular software, please fill out HCC’s software install request form. 

When can I use it? 

HCC invites all users to begin using Swan immediately.  Please note that while every effort has been made to test Swan prior to general availability, unforeseen issues may arise during the first few weeks of use.  If you have any questions or encounter any problems, please email [email protected].