Technical documentation

Welcome to the technical documentation wiki of the Digital Research Alliance of Canada (the Alliance). This is the primary source for users with questions on equipment and services of the Alliance.

The focus here is on national services and systems. For documentation on services and systems managed by our regional partners, please use the links provided below.

This wiki is a constant work-in-progress and some links might take you to pages which do not yet have content; such pages display like this. Our staff works constantly to improve and expand the available documentation; note however that any of our users is free to add new material and edit existing content.

Systems and services Systems: List of current systems General-purpose clusters, for CPU or GPU jobs Béluga, Cedar, Graham, Narval Known issues Niagara, a cluster designed for large parallel jobs System status and upcoming outages Services: Available software Cloud computing service Database servers Globus file transfer service Nextcloud cloud storage service Research Data Management Research Software Using a resource allocation, a guide for Principal Investigators FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions

How-to guides Getting started Getting started with the new national systems (mini-webinar series) Niagara Quick Start Guide Cloud Quick Start Guide SSH - How to connect to our compute clusters Linux introduction Storage and file management Transferring data Scratch purging policy Best practices for data migration Using modules and Standard software environments to access software Running jobs Installing software yourself Programming guide Visualization How to get technical support

Discipline guides AI and Machine Learning Bioinformatics Biomolecular simulation Computational chemistry Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) Geographic information systems (GIS) Humanities and Social Sciences Research Data Management Subatomic physics

Regional partners and services WestGrid SHARCNET SciNet Centre for Advanced Computing Calcul Québec ACENET