Quest User Guide

We strongly encourage all Quest users to review the summary of post-maintenance changes as these changes could immediately impact your workflow after the Quest March 2025 downtime.

Quest is Northwestern's High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster. It is used by researchers throughout the university. Quest is managed by Northwestern IT Research Computing Services.

An overview of Quest and information about applying for an allocation (account) can be found on the Research Computing Services website.

User Guides

• Quest Starting Points
  • Quest Quick Start
  • Quest FAQ
  • Introduction to Quest Training (Video)
  • Quest OnDemand (Brand New User-Friendly Quest Web Portal)
• About Your Quest Account/Environment
  • File Systems, Storage, and Permissions on Quest
  • Checking Allocation Resources
  • Full Access Allocation Management
• Logging into Quest
  • SSH Options (Terminal, PuTTY, etc): Good for Command Line
  • Virtual Desktop Options (FastX): Good for Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs)
  • Logging into Quest video tutorial (Video)
• Transferring Data To and From Quest and ....
  • Personal Laptop or Workstation
  • Research Data Storage Service or FSMRESFILES
  • Amazon S3
  • OneDrive/Sharepoint
  • More Details on Preferred Data Transfer Tool (Globus)
• Software Management on Quest
  • Requesting Software On Quest
  • Controlled by Quest Admins (needs sudo)
    • Software Available as Modules
  • Best practices and tools to manage your own software (does not need sudo)
    • Anaconda
    • Compiling Code on Quest
    • Containers
• SLURM Job Submission and Monitoring
  • Partitions
  • Computing Resources Available
    • Architectures
    • Standard CPU Nodes
    • GPU
    • High Memory
  • The SLURM Submission Script
    • Makeup of a SLURM Submission Script
    • Special Types of Job Submissions
    • Specifying Memory for Jobs On Quest
    • Debugging your SLURM Submission Script
  • I want to use SLURM to ...
    • Request the same computing resources multiple times while only changing the arguments passed to my application
    • Run a GUI program like MATLAB, Mathematica, STATA, rstudio on the compute nodes
    • Run a series of jobs that depend on one finishing before the other starts
  • More information about SLURM Job Submission and Monitoring
    • Managing Jobs on Quest
    • Checking Processor and Memory Utilization for Jobs on Quest
    • Troubleshooting Jobs on Quest
    • Factors Affecting Job Scheduling on Quest
    • SLURM tools (checkjob, squeue, seff, etc )
    • Extended SLURM Job and Submission Options
• Analytics Node
  • General Information
  • RStudio
  • SAS
  • Jupyter (Python)
• Popular Applications
  • R
    • Using RStudio Server or RStudio Desktop on a Quest compute node
    • Using R on Quest
    • Troubleshooting Installing R Packages on Quest and Quest Analytics
    • Troubleshooting Using R on Quest
  • Python
    • Using Python on Quest
    • Virtual Environments
    • Running Jupyter on Quest
  • MATLAB on Quest
  • Alphafold on Quest
  • Using Git On Quest
  • Knitro on Quest
  • Using VASP on Quest
• Genomics Compute Cluster
  • Getting Started on the Genomics Compute Cluster (b1042) on Quest
  • Parabricks on the Genomics Compute Cluster
  • Running GATK4 Spark on Quest