R in Katana

You are looking to use R in Katana @ Restech UNSW?

Learn more about UNSW’s High Performance Computer and how you can use for R analysis in this post!

Motivation

We live in a data-driven era, where collecting large amounts of information is becoming increasingly more accessible. There is now an unprecedented demand for more flexible and powerful computational tools in order to understand our data. The UNSW Katana computer cluster fulfills this criteria by providing student and staff computational resources to aid their research. One major benefit of Katana is the ability for users to run their computationally heavy analyses remotely - this frees up their own computer for other tasks.

What is Katana?

Katana is a shared computational cluster located on campus at UNSW Sydney that has been designed to provide easy access to computational resources for groups working with non-sensitive data.

With its 6,000 CPU cores, 8 GPU compute nodes (V100 and A100), and 6Pb of disk storage, Katana provides a flexible compute environment where users can run jobs that wouldn’t be possible or practical on their desktop or laptop.

What can I do with Katana?

Do you need a High Performance Computer for your analysis? Katana is the perfect spot to test if HPC is for you or not.

Depending on the magnitude of your research question and your expertise, Katana’s local support, node mix, long job runtimes and a wide range of software (with a special focus on the biosciences) probably has all you need for your research pipeline.

Do you need more power? Katana can provide a perfect training or development area before moving on to a more powerful system such as Australia’s peak HPC system, Gadi, located at the National Computing Infrastructure (NCI).

First steps on katana

The full UNSW Katana Documentation can be found at https://docs.restech.unsw.edu.au/index.html

Intro for R users

You can check the Katana for R workshop material for a first intro.