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High Performance Computing (HPC)

High-performance computing (HPC) is the use of either super computers and / or many high powered machines working in parallel to solve complex computational problems.

The HPC service at Çï¿ûÊÓƵ is built on 64 bit Centos Linux, with high speed interconnects designed to be used with MPI compatible applications. The HPC is currently being used by researchers in computational chemistry, analysis of DNA and bioinformatics.

Getting started

If you wish to request an account on the HPC system, please contact the IT Service Desk and ask that a member of the HPC team contact you to further discuss your requirements.  You may be asked to show you possess a basic understanding of the Linux command line interface and any applications you wish to use.

Once you have been issued an account, you will also need to be able to demonstrate that you can both connect to and transfer data to/from our HPC. Further guidance will be provided via the HPC team and the IT Service Desk.

HPC Specification

Computing Nodes

It is based around the Centos 7 (64 bit) Linux operating system and is composed of approximately 960 processing cores with the following specialised areas:

  • 12 compute nodes, each with 64 CPU cores (2.60GHz), 256 GB DDR4 RAM
  • 2 high memory nodes, each with 64 CPU cores (2.6GHz), 1 TB DDR4 RAM
  • 1 GPU node, with 64 cores (2.6GHz), 512 GB DDR4 RAM, 2x NVIDIA A100 with 40GB HBM2e memory
  • Mellanox InfiniBand interconnect (200 Gb/s node-switch)
  • 600 TB raw disk space providing 500 TB parallel file system ()

Legacy nodes imported from our 1st HPC

It is based around the Centos 7 (64 bit) Linux operating system and is composed of approximately 1000 processing cores with the following specialised areas:

  • 43 compute nodes, each with 20 CPU cores (2.4 GHz), 128 GB DDR4 RAM
  • 2 high memory nodes, each with 20 CPU cores (2.4 GHz), 512 GB DDR4 RAM
  • 5 GPU nodes, each identical to compute nodes with the addition of 2 x NVIDIA .
  • (100 Gb/s node-switch and switch-switch)

Infrastructure

  • Dedicated racks for storage and management components
  • UPS power failover
  • Dedicated 10Gb fibre uplink to University core network

Using the HPC

Support

HPC Launch Presentation

Available applications

You can view the applications available for HPC on the linked . (Please note that you will be redirected to the Microsoft Office 365 login page, where you will need to be authenticated using your University staff credentials to view the file.)

If you wish to request installation of a new application, this can be done via the Application Management Process (AMP).