Where CLIP fits
Choose between your workstation, CLIP and CBE, and MUSICA for your research computing.
Start on your workstation to develop and test. Move to CLIP when you need shared computing capacity, scheduled jobs, or supported scientific applications. If your project needs national-scale resources, we can point you toward MUSICA onboarding and the access process of Austrian Scientific Computing (ASC).
These options are not size thresholds. Many projects use more than one: you might develop on your workstation, run production analyses on CLIP, and request a MUSICA allocation for a later, larger phase.
Your workstation
Use your own computer to develop, explore, and run small tests. Typical work includes:
- Writing and debugging analysis scripts on a small subset of your data.
- Exploring results in a notebook or an R session.
- Preparing figures, reports, and manuscripts.
- Checking a pipeline configuration before you run it on the full dataset.
- Developing and testing GPU code on a local GPU, if your workstation has one, before you run it at scale on CLIP.
CLIP and CBE
Use CLIP when your work needs shared computing capacity, scheduled CPU or GPU jobs, or supported interactive applications. CBE, the CLIP Batch Environment, is the cluster you work on. Typical work includes:
- Running a workflow, such as a Nextflow pipeline, across all samples of a sequencing project.
- Repeating the same analysis over many inputs or parameter combinations as a job array.
- Training or applying machine-learning models, or predicting protein structures, on GPUs.
- Running analyses that need more memory or run longer than your workstation allows.
- Working in Jupyter, RStudio, or a remote desktop in your browser, with the session running on cluster resources.
See Solutions for the batch, interactive, and grid services, and Access to check eligibility and request an account.
MUSICA
MUSICA is a national, multi-site high-performance computing system operated by Austrian Scientific Computing (ASC), not by CLIP. Consider it when your project’s needs call for an ASC allocation, for example:
- Large simulations or analyses that need many nodes working together.
- A long-running project whose computing needs you can plan ahead and want to secure as a dedicated project allocation.
- Collaborations with partners at other Austrian institutions that already work on ASC systems.
Access is project-based, and ASC grants the resources. The VBC guide to getting started with MUSICA explains local onboarding, including the shared allocation for ÖAW institutes. The ASC MUSICA documentation is authoritative for accounts, projects, access, jobs, and storage, and ASC provides MUSICA support. If you do not know who manages your institute’s MUSICA allocation, ask through the HPC Servicedesk.
Not sure? Ask us
Email contact@clip.science with your affiliation, your group or lab, and a short description of your work. We help you choose the right option.