Northwestern IT offers high-performance computing resources on Quest, Northwestern’s high-performance computing (HPC) cluster. Housed at one of the University's secure data center facilities, Quest offers a large, shared computing facility. Quest is suitable for workloads requiring large amounts of computational resources, including AI and machine learning, parallel computation, data processing and analysis, multi-stage pipelines, and long-running batch computing jobs.
General Access
Request a Service: Information on the types of projects supported by Quest and application requirements can be found on the Quest Access and Resources page.
Available to: Any Northwestern University researcher or educator may request resources on the Quest computing cluster as the Project Lead, for the purpose of research or education. A Project Sponsor (faculty, staff, postdoc, or fellow) must be added at the time of the project creation.
Cost: There is no cost for this service.
Support: Please fill out our Quest User Support/Report an Issue form or e-mail quest-help@northwestern.edu.
Priority Access Compute
Researchers or research groups requiring more computational resources or storage than what is available through General Access can purchase additional resources on Quest.
Request a Service and Cost: Information about purchasing computational or storage resources on Quest can be found on the Purchasing Resources on Quest page.
Available to: Any Northwestern University researcher or faculty member with a chartstring can purchase resources on Quest.
Support: Please fill out our Quest User Support/Report an Issue form or e-mail quest-help@northwestern.edu.
Quest Analytics Nodes
The Quest Analytics Nodes allow users to run Python (via Jupyter notebooks), RStudio, and SAS Studio in their web browser, backed by Quest file systems and nodes with more computational resources than available on a personal computer.
Request a Service: More information about the analytics node can be found on the Quest Analytics Nodes page.
Available to: They are available to all Quest users with active research computing resources.
Cost: There is no cost for this service.
Support: Please fill out our Quest User Support/Report an Issue form or e-mail quest-help@northwestern.edu.
Genomics Compute Cluster
The Feinberg School of Medicine, in an initiative spearheaded by the Office of the Dean, the Center for Genetic Medicine, and the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics, provides over 4,000 cores on Quest’s Genomics Compute Cluster to Northwestern’s genomics community to foster and empower computational genomics research at Northwestern.
The Genomics Compute Cluster (GCC) continues to support different areas in computational genomics research including aligning sequencing data, RNA-Seq, ChIP -seq, single-cell analysis, whole genome analysis, running custom code, and many more. All genomics researchers at Northwestern are invited to join the GCC.
Request a Service/Cost/Available to: Information about the Genomics Compute Cluster and who is eligible for access can be found on the Genomics Compute Cluster documentation page.
Support: Please fill out our Quest User Support/Report an Issue form or e-mail quest-help@northwestern.edu.
Kellogg Linux Cluster
The KLC servers are far more powerful than even top-of-the-line personal workstations. The high amounts of memory, storage, and CPU available there allow you to tackle much bigger computational problems and work with much larger data files than you otherwise would. In addition, because KLC is a shared system, it is well suited for enabling work that is both highly collaborative and easily reproducible.
KLC offers advantages for those who are familiar with Kellogg's high-performance Windows servers. KLC offers the same, vast library of scientific computing software that Northwestern Quest uses. As a Linux-based system, KLC also offers straightforward ways for you to schedule jobs to run at certain times and to script sequences of tasks, both of which can save you effort and help with reproducibility.
Request a Service/Cost/Available to: Information about the Kellogg Linux Cluster and who is eligible for access can be found on the Kellogg Linux Cluster website.
Support: Please contact Kellogg Research Support at rs@kellogg.northwestern.edu for help with the Kellogg Linux Cluster.