High performance computing facilities

The University offers multiple HPC facilities. More information on our High performance computing site.

Description

There are two main accessible HPC clusters at the University:  the central HPC(KENNEDY) and the bioinformatics HPC(MARVIN).

KENNEDY

110 compute nodes in total each containing

  • 32 cores (two 2.1GHz 16-core Intel Broadwell Xeon E5-2683 processors)
  • 128GB memory
  • 87GB local scratch disk

Three of the 110 nodes are very high memory nodes with 2x500GB and 1x1.5TB memory. Two of the nodes are also GPU nodes.

There is also 400TB of shared disk are available as scratch space via the parallel GPFS file system.  

MARVIN

The resources of the Bioinformatics unit consist of a frontend (head) server and 10 worker nodes fully dedicated to NGS analysis. These are complemented by additional storage (56TB), giving a total of 192 CPU cores and 2.5TB RAM.

Total CPU cores

  • 192

Storage

  • 56TB with full backup  20TB without backup

Head node

  • Quad AMD Opteron 6320 (4 x 8 cores at 2.8GHz)
  • 512GB DDR3-1600 ECC Registered Memory
  • 2 x 300GB 15Krpm 6Gb/s SAS Hard Disk Drive

 8 standard memory nodes

  • Dual AMD Opteron 6320 (2 x 8 cores at 2.8GHz)
  • 128GB DDR3-1600 ECC Registered Memory
  • 1 x 300GB SSD Hard Disk

2 high memory nodes:

  • Dual AMD Opteron 6320 (2 x 8 cores at 2.8GHz)
  • 512GB DDR3-1600 ECC Registered Memory
  • 1 x 300GB SSD Hard Disk – SATA

 

 

Where do I go for help?

Visit High Performance Computing

Service cost

KENNEDY has low priority access which is free for the researcher, based on the contribution of their School towards the HPC budget. Otherwise it’s charged at £0.0118 per core per hour. Basic access can be granted for users who school does not contribute to the budget. Priority 1: pay per core hours Priority 2: schools who contribute Priority 3: everyone else.   MARVIN is £1.5kpa subscription, and then any assistance is 10% of research grant for sysadmin, 20% for data analysis/sysadmin.

Expertise level required to use this service

No technical expertise required, they need to understand their data/field.

 

For the central HPC (KENNEDY), non-chemistry software installation is attempted on a best-endeavors basis.