{"id":1060,"date":"2018-11-26T18:33:08","date_gmt":"2018-11-26T18:33:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ri.itservices.manchester.ac.uk\/csf3\/?page_id=1060"},"modified":"2025-12-01T22:45:45","modified_gmt":"2025-12-01T22:45:45","slug":"benefits","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/ri.itservices.manchester.ac.uk\/csf3\/overview\/benefits\/","title":{"rendered":"Benefits of the CSF"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2>Benefits of Contributing to, and using, the CSF<\/h2>\n<p>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:<\/p>\n<ul class=\"gaplist\">\n<li>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 &mdash; the cluster is full. Conversely, there are times when the cluster is quiet and &#8220;spare&#8221; CPU cycles are wasted.\n<p>With the shared model, such spare cycles can be used by another group &mdash; they are <em>not<\/em> wasted &mdash; and, when a group has a lot of computational work to perform, their usage is <em>not<\/em> limited by the capacity of their contribution, rather they, in turn, can use others&#8217; spare cycles to increase their throughput of jobs.\n<\/li>\n<li>Your funds are used to buy compute-node hardware, not the <a href=\"\/csf3\/faqs\/contrib-faq\/#csfbenefits\">additional infrastructure<\/a> needed in an HPC system, which is centrally funded. Hence you maximize your &#8220;compute&#8221; contribution to the system.<\/li>\n<li>The CSF is professionally managed (by the <a href=\"\/\">ITS RI Team<\/a>) 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!\n<\/li>\n<li>We provide <a href=\"https:\/\/www.staffnet.manchester.ac.uk\/staff-learning-and-development\/learning-pathways\/professional-and-technical-development\/it-skills\/research-computing\/research-courses\/\">training<\/a> and <a href=\"\/csf3\/overview\/help\/\">support<\/a> (including access to 100s of software applications) to users to ensure they can use the system effectively in their research.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Further benefits are outlined in the <a href=\"\/csf3\/faqs\/contrib-faq\">Contributor FAQ<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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:.. <a href=\"https:\/\/ri.itservices.manchester.ac.uk\/csf3\/overview\/benefits\/\">Read more &raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":8,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1060","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ri.itservices.manchester.ac.uk\/csf3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1060","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ri.itservices.manchester.ac.uk\/csf3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ri.itservices.manchester.ac.uk\/csf3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ri.itservices.manchester.ac.uk\/csf3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ri.itservices.manchester.ac.uk\/csf3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1060"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/ri.itservices.manchester.ac.uk\/csf3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1060\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11442,"href":"https:\/\/ri.itservices.manchester.ac.uk\/csf3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1060\/revisions\/11442"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ri.itservices.manchester.ac.uk\/csf3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/8"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ri.itservices.manchester.ac.uk\/csf3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1060"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}