HPC Introduction¶
High Performance Computing (HPC) provides researchers with the ability to expand their data processing, simulation and computation across hundreds of cores.
Over recent years there has been a huge increase in the number of HPC systems available for researchers and this has led to widespread use across many disciplines.
Architecture of an HPC Cluster¶
The basic architecture of a cluster consists of login nodes which allow access and submission of jobs to a scheduler, jobs are then dispatched to compute nodes for execution.
Due to the need for high performance, nodes are connected with high speed ethernet or low-latency InfiniBand.
HPC Tiers¶
Clusters are separated into three tiers: Local, Regional and National. Apocrita is QMUL's local cluster and access to a number of regional clusters is available to QMUL users.
Tier 3 - Local¶
Apocrita¶
Apocrita is the local cluster at QMUL, we have a variety of nodes and allow access to QMUL users and collaborators. See HPC Compute Nodes for information.
Tier 2 - Regional¶
We have access to a number of Tier 2 clusters, if you are running large parallel jobs you may benefit from access to these, please contact us to see if your job is appropriate and to organise access.
Thomas - Hub in Materials and Molecular Modelling¶
| Host Institution | Cores | Nodes | RAM per Node | Scheduler | EPSRC Grant |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| UCL | 17,280 | 720 | 128GB | SGE | EP/P020194/1 |
Athena - HPC Midlands Plus¶
| Host Institution | Cores | Nodes | RAM per Node | Scheduler | EPSRC Grant |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Loughborough | 14,336 | 512 | 128GB | Slurm | EP/P020232/1 |
JADE - Joint Academic Data science Endeavour¶
| Host Institution | Cores | Nodes | RAM per Node | Scheduler | EPSRC Grant |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oxford | TBD | TBD | TBD | TBD | EP/P020275/1 |
Tier 1 - National¶
Archer¶
| Host Institution | Cores | Nodes | RAM per Node | Scheduler |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Edinburgh | 118,080 | 4920 | 64GB | PBS |