As a scientist with a big workstation and access to several HPCs I can say that there is nothing better than having a powerful workstation. Yes, doing some sort of long runs is better on a cluster, but being able to do things locally without queue delays and various limitations imposed by HPCs is extremely valuable for initial development/experiments.
HPC ops teams are either really good or they're a dumping ground for grumpy DBAs/Operations people who have no skin in the game of getting anything done and it's a complete nightmare working with them.
As former HPC ops albeit in public service, we also tend to have funding for everything but ops personnel. This means you also often cannot afford the personnel you might be wishing for as they tend to go more towards better paying fields like devops etc.
It might (I say might) be worth your looking at xc [1] as a way to get more performance out of local/LAN hardware - assuming your program is data-parallel anyway.
[−]SubiculumCode · 2026-11-15 Sun 17:50 UTC ·
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Thanks!!
[−]SubiculumCode · 2026-11-15 Sun 17:49 UTC ·
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Exactly. The number of times you go, "oops, it would be better if I changed X first" matters less if you can restart right away without waiting to restarts (and also using up your credits on the aborted run).
1: https://github.com/ThrudTheBarbarian/xc