National HPC (Tier-1) and Tier-2 Support
Overview
If your computational requirements have grown beyond what on-site University platforms can provide, then the UK Tier-1 and Tier-2 platforms may offer a solution. We aim to help you:
- apply for time on these platforms;
- run jobs and optimise performance of your code too.
For more information about the platforms, please see the sections below.
If you would like advice or help regarding Tier-1 and/or Tier-2, please contact us at:
National Service: ARCHER2 (Tier-1)
7/10/2021: The latest EPSRC Access to HPC call has been opened today, for access to tier 1 ARCHER2 and tier 2 systems with a range of architectures for different computational needs. More info on the ARCHER2 news page.
The ARCHER2 platform (based at Edinburgh) comprises 5,860 compute nodes each with dual AMD EPYC Zen2 (Rome) 64 core processors, i.e., a total of 750,080 cores. All nodes are connected by Cray low-latency/high-bandwidth Slingshot interconnect. ARCHER2:
- is ideal for running large, parallel (i.e., true HPC) computational jobs
- it is not suitable for single-node high-memory work
Please see the ARCHER2 access page for how time on the system can be applied for.
N8-CIR (formerly N8-HPC)
The original N8-HPC platform, Polaris, has now been decommissioned. A new GPU cluster, Bede, containing 128 Nvidia V100 GPUs and IBM Power9 CPUs for multi-node GPU capable applications is now available! Please see our Bede page for more details.
Tier-2 Platforms
The following is a list of the EPSRC-funded Tier-2 services. It probably needs updating, and the futre of Tier 2s is uncertain.
- Cirrus, led by University of Edinburgh.
- CSD3, led by University of Cambridge.
- HPC Midlands Plus, led by Loughborough University.
- Isambard-3 and Isambard-AI, led by University of Bristol.
- JADE, led by University of Oxford.
- The Materials and Molecular Modelling (MMM) Hub, led by University College London.
- NI-HPC (Kelvin-2), led by Queen’s University Belfast.
- NICE, led by University of Durham (this is the “bede” system – the IBM PowerPC + Nvidia GPU platform available to University of Manchester researchers).
- Baskerville, led by University of Birmingham.
- Sulis, les by University of Warwick.
See also http://www.hpc-uk.ac.uk/access/ and possibilities of DiRAC and maybe SCARF for those with the “STFC Remit”.