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Course resources on the DCC: Education Cluster

IMPORTANT: We are retiring the education cluster (courses DCC group and courses/courses-gpu partitions) at the end of the Spring 2026 semester.

We are offering dedicated resources on the DCC for course support by providing access via SLURM SSH or OnDemand (web) for Rstudio, Jupyter, or a linux desktop. These collective resources are known as our Education Cluster. Resources dedicated for courses include 50 Infiniband connected servers with 86 cores and 479GB RAM each. 10 of these servers also have have 2 P100 (16GB RAM) GPUs (20 GPUs total).

For most courses at Duke, computational support is provided through OIT Virtual Labs (Virtual machines and containers for courses). DCC course access may be useful for:

  • 500 level or higher course with heavy computational needs
  • ML / AI courses
  • By request of the instructor

Requesting access for course

Instructors can email OITResearchSupport@duke.edu.

Please provide course ID, brief summary of need, TAs and any special requirements.

DCC conventions for course support

  • We will create a new courses DCC group for each semester and will name it accordingly; for example, for spring of 2026, the DCC group is named 'coursess26'
  • Students will only have access to the DCC while enrolled in their current course; at the end of each semester, the groups (and all data stored within the DCC group's storage) will be deleted and access to the DCC removed
  • Students will be added to the DCC courses group and will be able to access the DCC through the class roster automatically.
  • Student jobs/work should ONLY be submitted through the courses and courses-gpu partitions; if jobs are submitted to any other partition, they will not start
  • Instructors should place course materials in /hpc/group/courses[]/<courseid> (will need to use 'mkdir' to create first)
  • Students should store their files on the DCC at /hpc/group/courses[]/<courseid>/<netid> (will need to use 'mkdir' to create first, after instructors have created the course directory)
  • The courses resources are for course work only and no sensitive or regulated data is allowed on the DCC

Instructions for access

Instructors and/or TAs will be added to the courses DCC group. After that, an instructor or TA should create their courses's directory within the courses DCC group and name it for the course. Once done, that same instructor or TA should run a chmod command to allow the students in their course to create their own directories within the courses's directory. Below are step-by-step instructions for this process:

Instructor or TA should login to the DCC (https://dcc.duke.edu/dcc/login/#ssh-access) and do the following (using 'coursess26' as an example):

  1. Create a directory for the course under /hpc/group/coursess26 using your course’s name and number. For example, using a course named COURSE123: 
    rm145@dcc-login-02  ~ $ mkdir /hpc/group/coursess26/course123
  2. That same instructor or TA will then need to run a chmod on the directory created so that their students can write to that directory: 
    rm145@dcc-login-04  ~ $ chmod 775 /hpc/group/coursess26/course123
  3. We’ll then add the roster for the class, and once those students have been added, they’ll need to create their own directory within your course’s directory using their netIDs. For example, using my netID rm145 for course123: 
    rm145@dcc-login-02  ~ $ mkdir /hpc/group/coursess26/course123/rm145