Both Hive and Farm work on the Condo model of HPC. Key features of the condo model are:
Shared infrastructure - Each HPC cluster serves multiple groups.
Contributed resources by principal investigators - PIs purchase an amount of storage and compute for their projects.
Resource Allocation - PIs receive a proportional share of resources based on their investment.
Centralized Management - Each cluster is managed centrally by the HPC support team.
Get an account
Already affiliated with a sponsor?
Log into the HiPPO user portal using your CAS ID. Select FARM or Hive as your cluster. Import an SSH key by using an existing public key or generate a new key. Select your PI or sponsor as your group. Please note that your sponsor must approve your group affiliation after you request an account. They will receive an email prompting them to either approve or reject your group affiliation. Once approved, the HiPPO portal will take time to generate your account, create a directory on the cluster, and provide all the proper associations. Please be patient.
Not affiliated with a sponsor yet?
Graduate Students, Postdocs, and Faculty affiliated with UC Davis can apply for a sponsored account on Farm and Hive by going to the HiPPO user portal and selecting the proper cluster and sponsor. Individuals not affiliated with UC Davis must apply for a temporary affiliate account initiated by a sponsor.
Farm: please select the 'adamgrp' as your sponsor. Adam Getchell, the Executive Director for IT in the College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences, sponsors a computing tier for non-affiliated individuals.
Hive: please select the 'publicgrp' as your sponsor. The HPC@UCD group provides resources for all research affiliates.
Purchase resources
Principal investigators and researchers can purchase compute and storage resources and assign members to those resources via HiPPO.
To purchase resources on Farm, PI's can select from shopping cart items on the HiPPO portal and by providing an Aggie Enterprise chart string. Available resources for Farm are described here.
To purchase resources on Hive, PI's can select resources described on the rates page and by emailing hpc-help@ucdavis.edu. Compute resources are sold by CPU core, and storage is sold per terabyte. A PI can buy and make any number of cores available to their group. Each core purchase currently comes with 16 gigs of RAM. For instance, a PI can purchase 10, 20, or 128 cores and make them available to their group. In addition, a PI can purchase servers for their lab with the pre-approval of HPC@UCD. PIs selecting this route should also email a proposal to hpc-help@ucdavis.edu.
Connecting to the cluster
Once the account is approved, a user can use SSH to log into Farm by connecting to farm.hpc.ucdavis.edu and using their SSH key that they have uploaded to the Hippo user portal.
A user can log into Hive by using SSH to log into hive.hpc.ucdavis.edu and using the SSH key that they have uploaded to the HiPPO user portal. Alternatively, a user can use their campus kerberos computing account and passphrase to login.
Please note that HiPPO cannot currently accept files with multiple keys in it.
A user can ask for multiple group affiliations by requesting them via the HiPPO user portal. A user can refresh their public SSH key by uploading a new one to HiPPO (and waiting for the key to propagate).