Benefits of the CSF

Benefits of Contributing to, and using, the CSF

One of the key aims of the CSF is to replace the small, custom-built clusters around the campus. By pooling the hardware purchased from research group contributions and central funding, a much larger system can be made available. Such a system has a number of benefits, including:

• Better utilization: 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 CSF is professionally managed (by the ITS RI Team) and hosted in one of IT Services data centres. A researcher / PhD student is not spending their research time managing a small ad-hoc cluster!
• 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.