Getting Started

The Center for Computational Research (CCR) at the University at Buffalo is a high-performance computing center offering faculty, staff, students, and local businesses access to supercomputing environments, high-end visualization services, an on-premise research cloud environment, and experienced staff to help you move your research forward.

Note

CCR provides UB's research computing resources. All other IT services and support at UB is provided by UBIT

If you are unfamiliar with CCR and what services and resources we provide, please take a look at our detailed website: https://buffalo.edu/ccr

This 30 minute presentation provides a succinct overview of what CCR does and does not provide to the UB research community and industry partners. You can view additional information on our primary website: https://buffalo.edu/ccr



Intro to CCR Self-Paced Training

We highly encourage all users new to CCR to complete the Intro to CCR course available in UB Learns. This course contains modules and examples (assignments) to guide you through the most important concepts of using CCR's high performance computing environment. It is available for free to all UB faculty, staff, and students. If you are an external collaborator, RPCI faculty/staff, or industry customer, you can access the recorded videos on our YouTube channel.

As of the fall 2024 semester, completing this course is a pre-requisite for access to CCR for all undergraduate and graduate students using CCR for their coursework. See here for more info.

What do you want to do?

Tip

Need more assistance? Contact CCR Help

Computing Resources at CCR

High Performance Computing (HPC)
What do you need to know?

  • HPC resources are available through a cluster environment
  • Users submit batch jobs to a scheduler to run on servers (nodes) within the cluster
  • The UB-HPC cluster is available for academic & industry users
  • CCR also manages a separate cluster for privately purchased faculty nodes
  • Users login using a SSH client or the OnDemand web portal
  • There is no cost for UB faculty groups to use the UB-HPC cluster (student accounts must be sponsored by faculty)
  • Storage is shared among the clusters. More details on storage options

Research Cloud
What do you need to know?

  • Researchers utilize the on-premise cloud for projects not suited for the HPC environment
  • Examples of cloud uses: database warehouses, websites, container orchestration, software development projects, proof-of-concept testing, and other non-HPC scientific applications
  • Cloud compute time is billed by CPU hour & storage is sold in increments of 1TB
  • Billing info can be found here

Note

You must be on an active allocation for the resource(s) you want to use. More info here

What Resources Should I Use? This question is difficult to answer because of the range of needs we serve, disciplines we support, and resources we offer. If the descriptions above were not sufficient, please contact CCR Help to discuss.

In order to identify the best resource to use, we may ask specific questions, such as:

  • What software do you want to use?
  • Does the software require a commercial license?
  • Can the software be used non-interactively? That is, can it be controlled from a file prepared prior to its execution rather than through the graphical interface?
  • Can it run on the Linux operating system?
  • How much memory, time, computing power, accelerators, storage, network bandwidth and so forth --- are required by a typical job? Rough estimates are fine.
  • How frequently will you need to run this type of job?
    You may not know the answer to all of these questions. Please provide as much detail as you can and our technical support team will help you determine the most appropriate resources for your needs.