Northwestern IT offers for high-performance and high-throughput computing 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 computational facility. Quest is suitable for workloads requiring large amounts of computational resources, including 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 allocations supported by Quest, application deadlines, and required documentation can be found in the Allocation Submission and Review Guidelines.
Available to: Any Northwestern University researcher or educator may request an allocation on the Quest computational cluster as the allocation manager, for the purpose of research or education. Northwestern graduate students, postdocs, faculty, and staff may be allocation managers. Undergraduate students may use Quest but must be associated with a sponsoring allocation manager, principal investigator or research project.
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.
Full Access
Full Access to Quest is available through purchasing computational and/or storage resources on Quest. Computational resources are provided at a subsidized cost and jobs will start within 4 hours of submission time. Immediate access to computational resources is available through additional cost. Full Access users retain access to their compute nodes for a period of five years from the date of installation of the hardware and/or allocation of storage.
Request a Service and Cost: Information about purchasing computational or storage resources on Quest can be found here.
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 here.
Available to: They are available to all Quest users with an active allocation.
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 eligble for access can be found here.
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 eligble for access can be found here.
Support: Please contact Kellogg Research Support at rs@kellogg.northwestern.edu for help with the Kellogg Linux Cluster.