HPC centers, like TACC, host several supercomputers. Supercomputers, or computer clusters, are a group of interconnected computers such that they can act like a single machine. The various computers that make up the computer cluster are nodes which come in two types: login and compute. Login nodes are those that you interact with in logging on to our machines via SSH and are used for routine tasks like modifying and organizing files. Compute nodes are where the actual calculations are done and what we will utilize to parallelize the training of neural networks. A GPU node typically consists of multiple GPUs.

The TACC Analysis Portal (TAP) provides simplified access to interactive sessions on TACC large-scale computing resources. TAP targets users who want the convenience of web-based portal access. TAP Supports applications including Jupyter Notebook.