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Overview
What is the CSF?
The CSF (aka Danzek) is a High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster at the University of Manchester, managed by IT Services for the use of University academics, post-doctoral assistants and post-graduates. It is built on a shared model: all compute nodes are funded by contributions of funds to the system by University research groups; the cost of infrastructure such as login nodes, fileservers and network equipment is, for the most part, paid for by the University.
Academics are encouraged to contribute to the CSF rather than purchase their own smaller HPC clusters.
There is some “free at the point of use” resource available in the CSF. Please contact us if you are interested in using this.
The cluster has 9,844 cores.
Talk to the Research Infrastructure Team
To find out more about the CSF, contact the IT Services RI team: its-ri-team@manchester.ac.uk.
Continuing Expansion
The CSF began with a 180k procurement in December 2010, 90k coming from an initial University seed investment and the remainder from three initial academic contributions. As a result of continual expansion since then, the system now comprises hardware from contributions worth approximately 3.5 million pounds.
This collaborative approach results in a constantly expanding high-end computing pool providing capabilities which would not be available to research groups operating their own, separate clusters.
Benefits of Contributing to the CSF
- Typically, usage of a small HPC cluster owned and used by an individual research group is not uniform: there are times when usage is limited by the number of CPUs available — the cluster is full; there are times when the cluster is quiet and “spare” CPU cycles are wasted.
With the shared model, such spare cycles can be used by another group — they are not wasted — and, when a group has a lot of computational work to perform, their usage is not limited to the capacity of the hardware they contributed, rather they, in turn, can use others’ spare cycles to increase their throughput of jobs. (The figures on the CSF Dashboard illustrate this very well.)
- The CSF is professionally managed (by the ITS RI Team) and hosted in one of IT Services data centres.
- We provide training and support (including access to 100s of software applications) to users to ensure they can use the system effectively in their research.
- Further benefits are outlined in the Contributor FAQ.