Access to External UK HPC Facilities
The United Kingdom has a number of HPC facilities external to the University of Sheffield which will grant researchers HPC resources. These include National facilities (Tier 1) such as Archer 2 and regional systems (Tier 2) such as JADE, JADE2 and BEDE.
The University of Sheffield is a member of the JADE, JADE2 and BEDE regional systems thus registration for using resources on these systems is straightforward with dedicated pages describing these systems and their application processes listed below.
Further Tier 1 and Tier 2 systems are also listed below with a brief explanation of their purpose along with links for further details.
University of Sheffield Directly Affliated HPC Systems
UK National HPC Systems
ARCHER2
ARCHER2, the new UK national supercomputing service offers a capability resource for running very large parallel jobs. Based around an HPE Cray EX supercomputing system with an estimated peak performance of 28 PFLOP/s, the machine will have 5,848 compute nodes, each with dual AMD EPYC Zen2 (Rome) 64 core CPUs at 2.2GHz, giving 748,544 cores in total. The initial service, which will be live from early 2021, is based on a subset of 4 cabinets of the total 23 cabinet system. The remaining 19 cabinets will be added later in 2021. The service includes a service desk staffed by HPC experts from EPCC with support from HPE Cray. Access is free at point of use for academic researchers working in the EPSRC and NERC domains. Users will also be able to purchase access at a variety of rates.
EPSRC affliated HPC Systems
Cirrus at EPCC
Cirrus at EPCC is one of the EPSRC Tier-2 HPC facilities. The main resource is a 10,080 core SGI/HPE ICE XA system. Cirrus Phase II saw the addition of 36 HPE Plainfield Blades each with two Intel Xeon processors and four NVIDIA v100 GPUs. Free access is available to academic researchers working in the EPSRC domain and from some UK universities; academic users from other domains and institutions can purchase access.
Isambard at GW4
Isambard at GW4 is one of the EPSRC Tier-2 HPC facilities. Isambard provides multiple advanced architectures within the same system in order to enable evaluation and comparison across a diverse range of hardware platforms. Free access is available to academic researchers working in the EPSRC domain and from some UK universities; academic users from other domains and institutions can purchase access.
Cambridge Service for Data Driven Discovery (CSD3)
Cambridge Service for Data Driven Discovery (CSD3) is one of the EPSRC Tier-2 HPC facilities. CSD3 is a multi-institution service underpinned by an innovative, petascale, data-centric HPC platform, designed specifically to drive data-intensive simulation and high-performance data analysis. Free access is available to academic researchers working in the EPSRC domain and from some UK universities; academic users from other domains and institutions can purchase access.
Sulis at HPC Midlands+
Sulis at HPC Midlands+ is a Tier-2 HPC platform for ensemble computing workflows, realised through replicating workstation-scale calculations over many inputs or models. Sulis delivers substantial HPC capacity targeted at data-intensive, high-throughput workloads, based on modern software deployment and containerisation technologies to enable scale up from workstation to Tier-2 with minimal code modification. The platform is further supported by a developing Research Software Engineering training effort which recognises non-traditional routes to large-scale scientific research. Access to Sulis is available through the EPSRC Access to HPC calls or via the HPC Midlands+ Consortium.
MMM Hub (Materials and Molecular Modelling Hub)
The MMM Hub (Materials and Molecular Modelling Hub) was designed specifically for the materials and molecular modelling community, this Tier 2 supercomputing facility is available to HPC users all over the UK. The MMM Hub was established in 2016 with a £4m EPSRC grant awarded to collaborators The Thomas Young Centre (TYC), and the Science and Engineering South Consortium (SES). The MMM Hub is led by University College London on behalf of the eight collaborative partners who sit within the TYC and SES: Imperial, King’s, QMUL, Oxford, Southampton, Kent, Belfast and Cambridge.
NI-HPC
The NI-HPC Centre is a UK Tier-2 National High Performance Computing (HPC) facility funded by EPSRC and jointly managed by Queen’s University Belfast (QUB) and Ulster University. The focus is on introducing new aspects of HPC modelling for neurotechnology and computational neuroscience, advanced chemistry, innovative drug delivery, precision medicine, metabolomics and hydrogen safety. The cluster is named Kelvin2 and is comprised of 60x128core AMD nodes, 4x2TB hi-memory nodes and 32xNVIDIA v100s. A fast track allocation process is available for researchers wishing to try the facility.
STFC affliated HPC Systems
Dirac
DiRAC is the STFC HPC facility for particle physics and astronomy researchers. It is currently made up of five different systems with different architectures. These range from an extreme scaling IBM BG/Q system, a large SGI/HPE UV SMP system, and a number of Intel Xeon multicore HPC systems. Free access is available to academic researchs working in the STFC domain; academic researchers from other domains can purchase access.