Who can use or should use a HPC cluster?#

Typically a researcher’s local desktop or laptop has between 8 to 16 GB of memory, 4 to 16 CPU cores and a few TB of disk space where HPC clusters will usually have at least an order of magnitude more resources, if not more. Their research workloads may be too large for their own machine due to not having enough memory, disk space or it may simply take too long to run computations in a timely manner.

The thought of using a HPC cluster might seem intimidating to researchers, but in principle any researcher with a workload that is too large for their desktop or laptop should access HPC resources and can do so via a small amount of HPC training.