The service covers the use of the university's own scientific computing clusters and storage environment, as well as support for computing software.
The service enables researchers, students and teaching staff to use the university's own High Performance Computing (HPC) environment. The HPC environment includes CPU and GPU computing capacity as well as fast storage for scientific computing needs.
The service also includes the central distribution and administration of the most common scientific computing software used in the HPC environment. Users are provided training and instructions to help in using the computing clusters and the related software.
The university's HPC environment has been implemented in such a way that the transition to the corresponding CSC services is as straightforward and easy as possible for the user. It is therefore advisable to use the corresponding services offered by CSC whenever possible and reasonable: https://research.csc.fi/csc-s-servers.
CSC provides its own support service for using its services: https://research.csc.fi/support.
The computing environment also meets the requirements of the CERN CMS computing environment (not available by default to ordinary users).
The service is available by contacting the Helpdesk: https://helpdesk.it.helsinki.fi/en/help/7003. Using the service requires a university user account and an IDM the members of which will be granted rights to access the environment.
The IT Center is responsible for the maintenance, development and support of the university's computing cluster environment.
The user of the service is responsible for general compliance with the terms of use of the university's information systems.
The person responsible for the research group/member of teaching staff is responsible for the activities and management of their own group, and is obligated to follow the instructions given for the use of the service.
The IT Center may block an individual user or group of users from accessing the service if their activities cause harm to other users of the service, contrary to the instructions given on the use of the service.
1. Instructions: https://version.helsinki.fi/it-for-science/hpc/-/wikis/home
2. Helpdesk: https://helpdesk.it.helsinki.fi/en/help/7003
3. HPC Garage support service (ordered from Helpdesk)
4. Training (University of Helsinki, Aalto, CSC)
Basic services are free of charge.
However, university units and research groups can invest in the expansion of the centralised computing environment and thus acquire more extensive computing and storage capacity for their own use compared with the basic service. For such needs, units or research groups should primarily contact the university's Helpdesk: https://helpdesk.it.helsinki.fi/help/7003.