Access and User Instructions for the RAMSES Cluster
The Tier2 cluster RAMSES can be used by members of the University of Cologne, research groups from the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia, and researchers in the life sciences from Germany. Interested researchers can apply for access to the cluster on our JARDS portal. For that, a short project description is needed to review the application for computing time.
Please note: The PDF document generated when submitting the application must be signed by a University of Cologne senior staff member (PI, professor, lab head, etc.) AND by the person submitting the application (contact person), even though there is currently only one signature field available.
JARDS portal to apply for a standard account on RAMSES
Apart from the standard account, we also offer a trial account with limited compute and storage resources that does not require a project description. A link to the trial application is provided below. Like for the standard account, the signature of a UoC senior staff member AND the contact person is required to obtain a RAMSES trial account.
Access for members of the university
Members of the University of Cologne need an active student or personal account. This account gets the authorization to calculate on the RAMSES cluster after an application and approval on our JARDS portal.
Access for external research groups
The use of the RAMSES cluster is reserved for non-commercial research. Thus, working groups that are predominantly funded by the universities of North Rhine-Westphalia, the EU or the federal government can apply for a guest account and HPC access. This option is also available for third-party funded research projects that are predominantly funded by the DFG or a foundation.
User instructions for using RAMSES
We have compiled all important information on working on the clusters for interested, beginners and advanced students.
Access requirements, server addresses, first login, archiving of data, batch system, development environment, application software, its settings and examples of job scripts:
Acknowledgement in publications
Your research is our driving force - the results of your research are in most cases also published in peer-reviewed journals or conference proceedings. It would be very helpful for us, and thus for all our users, if we were mentioned in the acknowledgement of your publication, e.g.:
“We furthermore thank the ITCC (IT Center University of Cologne) for providing compute resources on the DFG-funded HPC (High Performance Computing) system RAMSES (Research Accelerator for Modeling and Simulation with Enhanced Security) as well as support (DFG funding number: INST 216/512-1 FUGG).”
This helps us to underpin and demonstrate the need to use public funds provided for research purposes. Please inform us about your publications so that we can refer to them if necessary. Thank you very much!
Additional information
If you need more information about using a HPC-System or basic information about high performance computing we recommend the following wiki project page: https://hpc-wiki.info