Skip to content

Welcome to the QMUL HPC blog

Creating and Using Private Modules

Modules are the centralised method of accessing different software on an HPC cluster. By using a variety of modules you can quickly and easily access different versions of applications and create work flows that suit particular projects. The modules offered on Apocrita cover a wide range of applications but there will always be situations that require something unusual or a relatively niche version of a piece of software.

Modules Update December 2022

Since the last module update in December 2021, we have:

  • added/moved 84 modules to production
  • added 9 modules to the development environment
  • deprecated 5 modules
  • deleted 12 modules

Speeding Up Grep Searches

Sometimes you may find yourself needing to filter a large amount of output using the grep command. However, grep can sometimes struggle when you try to filter files with an incredibly large number of lines, as it loads each line into RAM line-by-line. This can mean you can quickly exhaust even large amounts of requested RAM. There are a few ways around this.

R Tutorial Part Two - R vs RStudio

Following up from part one of our R tutorial we'll be taking a look at the differences between R - the command-line language which can be loaded as a module and used in your Apocrita batch jobs - and Rstudio - the graphical development environment, accessed via a web server and provided via the OnDemand service.

R Tutorial Part One - Top Tips

The ITSR support team often receive tickets from R users that cover similar ground. So we thought we would collate our most frequent responses into some "Top Tips"! The tips below apply equally to Rscript but this article only covers the interactive R program.

Migrating to a new research storage system

As the current 2 PetaByte Research Data Storage on Apocrita reaches end of life this summer, we have procured a new storage system, providing 5PB of capacity. This means faster, bigger and cheaper storage for you, the researcher! Read on to discover the benefits...but first, an important notice.

RSE team activities up to June 2022

The RSE team in ITS Research has had a busy few years since we started sharing our work in this blog. In this post we look at some highlights of recent activity and what we have to look forward to.

Using job statistics to increase job performance and reduce queueing time

You may wonder why some jobs start immediately but some wait in the queue for hours or days, even if your job is quite simple. If you notice your job has been queueing for a while, you may want to consider adjusting the requested resources to reduce queueing time and reduce any potential resource wastage as the job runs. Below, we outline two useful tools for you to check the resource usage of previous jobs.