⚠️ Only UCSF P1-P2 data ("research using public data sets") is allowed on the Wynton cluster as of 2026-01-30.
⚠️ Please note that the Wynton HPC service is being phased out as part of the Wynton Transition project and is scheduled to retire in early March, 2027. New research projects should generally use the newer FAC and CoreHPC environment instead. ⚠️
Although you should always run analyses via the job scheduler, there are times when you may need to develop parts of it interactively at the command-line prompt. For instance, you may need to install some software, a few R packages, or run some quick tests on your new pipeline. Wynton HPC provides development nodes dedicated for such short-term usages and that are configured similarly to the compute nodes.
Please do not run your real-world analysis on the development nodes. Instead, run it as a job via the scheduler - this will assert that your analysis runs as fast as possible and with all the resources it needs. For further instruction, see the getting-started page Submit Job to Cluster.
Any shell session that has been idle for more than eight hours will timeout and exit automatically.
CPU use is throttled to 4 CPU cores/user, and memory use is limited to 96 GiB/user. If a process overuses the memory, it will be killed by the operating system.
To access one of the development nodes, say, dev2.wynton.ucsf.edu,
make sure you are logged in to the cluster, and
type ssh dev2.wynton.ucsf.edu and press ENTER.
From one of the login nodes, do:
[alice@log2 ~]$ ssh dev2.wynton.ucsf.edu
alice1@dev2:s password: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
[alice@dev2 ~]$
As from the login nodes, it is possible to submit jobs also from the development nodes.