Where do I run my analysis?

TOBYs

The TOBYs are RBGE’s own analysis servers, allowing staff and students to work with big data sets. The server is divided in three giant instances: TOBY_G1, TOBY_G2, TOBY_G3 (each 56 cores, 416MB RAM 8TB storage) along with one medium (toby-m1).

Crop Diversity HPC

The UK’s Crop Diversity Bioinformatics High Performance Computing (HPC) Linux cluster is run by the James Hutton Institute’s Information & Computational Sciences (ICS) Research Computing team, and the Scientific Computing section of NIAB’s IT team, and it shared by six UK institutions, including RBGE.

If you prefer to run your analysis in a cluster, here are instruction on how to access and use it Crop Diversity HPC. The Crop Diversity cluster has a very active community, including a slack channel, that is very helpful and quick in answering questions/solving issues.

Which one should I use?

So what is the difference between a server and a cluster? In simple terms, a cluster is a combination of multiple servers that are managed together. In general, a cluster will be more powerful, i.e., you can run your analysis faster. However, clusters can get busy and if you have a big job to run, you might have to wait until the resource is available (enter the queue).