Bridges-2 Regular Memory is a general-purpose computing resource at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center designed for CPU-based workloads. It provides high-core-count nodes optimized for parallel computing, data analysis, and scientific applications that do not require GPU acceleration.
Regular Memory (RM) nodes each contain 128 CPU cores and are well suited for a wide range of workloads including simulations, pre- and post-processing, machine learning inference, and large-scale data analytics. Most nodes provide 256 GB of RAM, with a subset offering 512 GB for more memory-intensive applications.
Resources are allocated in core-hours (Service Units), allowing users to run either full-node jobs or smaller jobs using a subset of cores through shared partitions.
Jobs
Jobs on Bridges-2 Regular Memory (RM) nodes are scheduled using Slurm and run in either the RM or RM-shared partitions. RM nodes are CPU-only and each node contains 128 cores. These resources are allocated in units of core-hours, where the use of one CPU core for one hour equals 1 Service Unit (SU).
Full-node jobs can be submitted to the RM partition, where all 128 cores on a node may be used. Using an entire node for one hour results in 128 core-hours, or 128 SUs being charged.
If fewer cores are required, jobs can be submitted to the RM-shared partition, which allows users to request a subset of cores on a node. In this case, SU usage is based only on the number of cores used and the runtime. For example, using 2 cores for 30 minutes results in 1 core-hour, or 1 SU.
RM nodes are intended for general-purpose workloads, including parallel computing, data analysis, simulations, machine learning inference, and pre- and post-processing tasks.
Queue specifications
Metrics updated 2026-06-16
| Name | Purpose | CPUs | GPUs | RAM | Jobs
30 days
|
Wait Time
30-day trend
|
Wall Time
30-day trend
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 256 GB | General-purpose computing on Regular Memory nodes. | 2 AMD EPYC 7742 CPUs, 64 cores per CPU (128 cores per node, 2.25–3.40 GHz) | 256 GB | — | — | — | |
| 512 GB | General-purpose computing on higher-memory Regular Memory nodes for memory-intensive workloads. | 2 AMD EPYC 7742 CPUs, 64 cores per CPU (128 cores per node, 2.25–3.40 GHz) | 512 GB | — | — | — |
Software
The following software packages are among the most frequently used on Bridges-2 RM, based on job data from XDMoD.
Most Frequently Used
| Application | Description | Research Discipline | Jobs |
|---|---|---|---|
| python | Python is a high-level, interpreted programming language known for its simplicity and readability. It supports multiple programming paradigms and has a vast ecosystem of libraries and frameworks. | Computer & Information Sciences, Software Engineering, Systems & Development | 322,040 |
| cp2k | CP2K is an open-source quantum chemistry and solid state physics software package designed to perform atomistic simulations of solid-state, liquid, molecular, and biological systems. It can be used to study a wide range of properties, including electronic structures, molecular dynamics, and vibrational spectra. | Physical Sciences | 34,879 |
| r | R is a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics. It compiles and runs on a wide variety of UNIX platforms, Windows, and MacOS. | Computer Science | 33,917 |
| lammps | LAMMPS (Large-scale Atomic/Molecular Massively Parallel Simulator) is a classical molecular dynamics code designed for simulating large-scale atomistic systems. It is highly versatile and can be used to model a wide range of materials and complex molecular structures. | Chemical Sciences | 32,272 |
| lastz | 22,915 | ||
| q-espresso | 19,557 | ||
| gromacs | GROMACS (GROningen MAssive Parallel MD for Molecular Dynamics) is a versatile package for molecular dynamics simulations with a strong emphasis on high-performance computing capabilities. | Biological Sciences | 16,315 |
| orca | Orca is a flexible, efficient, and powerful quantum chemistry software written by Frank Neese and co-workers. It provides accurate and reliable computational simulations of molecular structures and properties based on quantum mechanical methods. | Chemical Sciences | 4,837 |
| samtools | Samtools is a suite of programs for interacting with high-throughput sequencing data generated in sequence alignment/map (SAM) format, such as those produced by the Short Read Mapping (SHRiMP) or Burrows-Wheeler Aligner (BWA) aligners. It allows various operations on SAM/BAM files, including indexing, sorting, merging, and manipulating sequence alignments. | Biological Sciences | 3,433 |
| gamess | The General Atomic and Molecular Electronic Structure System (GAMESS) is a suite of ab initio quantum chemistry programs designed for electronic structure calculations of molecules and molecular reactions. It provides a wide range of methods for both molecules and periodic solids. | Chemical Sciences | 2,219 |
Datasets
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| 2019nCoVR: 2019 Novel Coronavirus Resource | The 2019 Novel Coronavirus Resource concerns the outbreak of novel coronavirus in Wuhan, China since December 2019. For more details about the statistics, metadata, publications, and visualizations of the data, please visit https://ngdc.cncb.ac.cn/ncov/. Available on Bridges-2 at /ocean/datasets/community/genomics/2019nCoVR. |
| AlphaFold | The AlphaFold protein structure database contains over 990,00 protein structure predictions for the human proteome and other key proteins of interest. For more information, see https://alphafold.ebi.ac.uk/. Available on Bridges-2 at /ocean/datasets/community/alphafold. |
| CIFAR-10 | The CIFAR-10 dataset is a subset of the 8 million tiny images dataset, which contains 60,000 images in ten classes. See https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~kriz/cifar.html for more details. Available on Bridges-2 at /ocean/datasets/community/cifar. |
| COCO | COCO (Common Objects in Context) is a large scale image dataset designed for object detection, segmentation, person keypoints detection, stuff segmentation, and caption generation. Please visit http://cocodataset.org/ for more information on COCO, including details about the data, paper, and tutorials. Available on Bridges-2 at /ocean/datasets/community/COCO. |
| CosmoFlow | CosmoFlow consists of data from around 10,000 cosmological N-body dark matter simulations. Anyone with a Bridges-2 allocation can use CosmoFlow data, but you must request access via the CosmoFlow request form. Please visit the CosmoFlow site at https://portal.nersc.gov/project/m3363/ for more information about this dataset. Available on Bridges-2 at /ocean/datasets/community/cosmoflow. |
| ImageNet | ImageNet is an image dataset organized according to WordNet hierarchy. See the ImageNet website for complete information https://image-net.org/. Available on Bridges-2 at /ocean/datasets/community/imagenet. |
| MNIST | Dataset of handwritten digits used to train image processing systems. Available on Bridges-2 at /ocean/datasets/community/mnist. |
| Natural Languge Tool Kit Data | NLTK comes with many corpora, toy grammars, trained models, etc. A complete list of the available data is posted at: http://nltk.org/nltk_data/. Available on Bridges-2 at /ocean/datasets/community/nltk. |
| OpenWebText | Available on Bridges-2 at /ocean/datasets/community/openwebtext. |
| PREVENT-AD | The PREVENT-AD (Pre-symptomatic Evaluation of Experimental or Novel Treatments for Alzheimer Disease) cohort is composed of cognitively healthy participants over 55 years old, at risk of developing Alzheimer Disease (AD) as their parents and/or siblings were/are affected by the disease. These ‘at-risk’ participants have been followed for a naturalistic study of the presymptomatic phase of AD since 2011 using multimodal measurements of various disease indicators. Two clinical trials intended to test pharmaco-preventive agents have also been conducted. The PREVENT-AD research group is now releasing data openly with the intention to contribute to the community’s growing understanding of AD pathogenesis. Available on Bridges-2 at /ocean/datasets/community/prevent_ad. |
| TCGA Images | Available on Bridges-2 at /ocean/datasets/community/tcga_images |
| Genomics datasets | These datasets are available to anyone with an allocation on Bridges-2. They are stored under /ocean/datasets/community/genomics. AUGUSTUS, BLAST, CheckM, Dammit, Homer, Kraken2, Pfam, Prokka Repbase
|
Storage
File System
| Directory | Path | Quota | Purge | Backup | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| $HOME | /jet/home/PSC-username | 25 GB | No automatic purge during allocation; After allocation, accessible for 14 days, deleted after 3 months | Backed up daily | |
| $PROJECT | /ocean/projects/groupname/PSC-username | Defined by allocation | No automatic purge during allocation; After allocation, accessible for 14 days, deleted after 3 months | No back up | |
| $LOCAL | Node-local (no global path) | Varies by node type | Deleted immediately when job ends | No back up | |
| $RAMDISK | Node memory (no filesystem path) | Depends on allocated node memory | Deleted immediately when job ends | No back up |
File Transfer
| Supported Methods | Data Transfer Node | URL |
|---|---|---|
| RSYNC | data.bridges2.psc.edu | |
| SCP | data.bridges2.psc.edu | |
| SFTP | data.bridges2.psc.edu | |
| GLOBUS | RECOMMENDED | PSC Bridges-2 /ocean and /jet filesystems | https://app.globus.org |
Login to Bridges-2 RM
Bridges-2 is accessed via SSH using ACCESS credentials.
Users must:
- Have an active ACCESS allocation on Bridges-2
- Have an account with the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center
- Use SSH from a local machine (login nodes do not initiate transfers)