A joint initiative between the Faculty of Science, the Faculty of Engineering and Design, the Office of the Vice-President (Research and International) and Information Technology Services, the Research Computing and Development Cloud (RCDC) is available to Carleton University researchers.

The RCDC uses the OpenStack cloud computing software built upon Canonical’s Ubuntu operating system. The purpose of the RCDC is to allow researchers access to data science and analytics tools as well as to provide a development environment to create their own applications before transitioning to larger compute platforms. The RCS team can help with guidance and expertise to develop new code, improve existing code workflow and performance in order to reduce overall runtime in addition to directing users with greater requirements to other available resources.

Technical details about the RCDC

  • OpenStack cloud based on Canonical’s Ubuntu operating system (Linux environment).
  • 656 Intel Xeon compute cores (x86)
  • The following GPUs for general-purpose computing:
    • 8 NVIDIA Tesla A100 80GB GPUs
    • 16 NVIDIA Tesla A100 40GB GPUs
    • 2 NVIDIA Tesla V100 16GB GPUs
    • 16 NVIDIA GTX 1080ti 11GB GPUs donated by Cancer Computer
  • Total of 11.5TB memory
  • Storage and compute nodes are secured by Carleton’s firewall and is only accessible from campus by Carleton faculty/students or from off-campus by using a Virtual Private Network (VPN) connection.

For more information or instructions on accessing, please contact contact RCS. If you use the RCDC as a part of your published research, it would be greatly appreciated if you could acknowledge RCS in your publication.

Documentation

You will find here information on getting started with Carleton’s RCDC compute facility, and general tips on using Linux compute servers.

As a Carleton researcher, if you have technical questions concerning your computing that are not answered here, please do not hesitate to get in touch with the RCS team.

Getting Started with RCDC

Advanced Topics