Getting started

If you are reading this, you have decided to follow the journey of a non-system admin setting up an academic research lab’s computational stack. I am not making any claims that this is the way to setup a computational cluster, but it is technically a “working” way. My learning is primarily done through teaching and writing documentation, so this supplements my goldfish memory and maybe helps you—somehow.

LabStack may be helpful if you (a) have more than two somewhat powerful computers and (b) want to spend many, many hours learning, setting up, and maintaining the cluster instead of spending money on your local high-performance computing (HPC) organization or common cloud computer platforms. Or if you just want to learn sys admin stuff; that is cool too.