An Introduction to Viking

Owned by Emma Barnes
Last updated: 05 Feb, 2024 by Neil Douglas

This course is a continuation An Introduction to Research Computing at York.  If you are new to Linux command line we recommend you go through the steps of An Introduction to Research Computing at York first before moving Viking.

There is also a video demoing how to use Viking taken from the research coding club meeting here


Before you login to Viking

Viking Account Creation

Before you can access Viking you will to create a Viking account. The process can take a couple of days please complete the following steps

  1. Before logging into Viking please ensure your project supervisor fills in this form to request a project code.
  2. The user then needs to fill in this form to request an account once they have a project code. 
  3. Accounts should take no longer than 24 hours to be created. You will receive an email on creation of your account.

See /wiki/spaces/RCS/pages/39158623 for more information


What is the Viking cluster and why should I use it?

If you are finding that your code is still taking a long time to finish or you wish to scale your work, the Viking cluster may be what you need. 

Viking is a large Linux compute cluster aimed at users who require a platform for development and the execution of small or large compute jobs.  Viking is a multidisciplinary facility, supporting a broad spectrum of research needs, free at the point of use to all University of York researchers. Viking is as much a facility for learning and exploring possibilities as it is a facility for running well-established high-performance computing workloads. In this light, we encourage users from all Faculties, backgrounds and levels of ability to consider Viking when thinking about how computing might support their research.

What is a cluster?

A cluster consists of many (hundreds or thousands) rack mounted computers called nodes. It would be similar to having hundreds of desktop computers sitting in the same room and able to talk to each other.  Clusters are often accessed via login nodes, which can send jobs to the other nodes in the cluster. Your commands will not be run immediately, but will be sent to a queue, and run when there is space on the cluster.

The Viking cluster is Linux based and can be accessed in a similar manner to the research servers, but instead of accessing, say, research0.york.ac.uk, you would access viking.york.ac.uk.


Help and support

In the first instance check our wiki pages or email itsupport@york.ac.uk where one of our team will be in touch.