Is a compute server faster?

Q. A compute server is faster than my laptop or desktop computer, right?

A. The short answer is usually "no" or "it depends." Often a server isn't actually "faster" than your home or office system. But, a server - or a number of servers combined in a cluster - can scale to handle larger processing tasks than your office or home system. Say you're running a statistical application with a moderate data set on your excellent, newer laptop. This laptop has an Intel Core i5 processor (2.0GHz dual-core), 8GB of 1866MHz RAM and 512GB SSD. If the application running on your laptop only uses part of one core of the CPU and only some of the RAM, why would it run faster on a server?

But, if what if you need to run a bigger data set? You notice you're using all of the memory on your laptop, or that the processor is maxed out. A typical compute server will have at least 2 CPU's (12 - 20 cores) and 128GB RAM. You can process larger data sets and perform longer-running computations without tying up your laptop. And most of our computational servers have large amounts of available scratch storage (10 - 200TB) so you can store and work with these data sets.