High Performance Computing
SES members are now able to access two high performance computing centres, JADE and the MMM Hub, after recent funding from EPSRC for six new regional centres. If your institution is a member of the new regional centres and you would like to access that centre, please contact them directly (details below).
EPSRC will publish an open call for proposals in August to allow access to 5 of the new regional Facilities (Cirrus, GW4, CSD3, HPC Midlands +, and JADE). All access options for the MMM Hub can be found via their website.
Joint Academic Data Science Endeavour
Joint Academic Data Science Endeavour
A consortium of eight UK universities, led by the University of Oxford, JADE is designed for the needs of machine learning and related data science applications. There has been huge growth in machine learning in the last 5 years, and this is the first national facility to support this rapid development, with the university partners including the world-leading machine learning groups in at Oxford, King’s College London, QMUL, UCL, and the University of Southampton. For enquiries or to access JADE, please email JADE-support@arc.ox.ac.uk.
Materials and Molecular Modelling Hub
Materials and Molecular Modelling Hub
The MMM Hub is a partnership of nine of the UK’s leading universities, with all SES members comprising a part of this group (UCL, Imperial College London, Queen Mary University of London, Queen’s University Belfast, the University of Kent, King’s College London, the University of Southampton, the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge, and OCF plc). It is designed to support small to medium sized capacity computing focusing on materials and molecular modelling. For enquiries or to access the Hub, please email rc-support@ucl.ac.uk.
Institutional HPC
Below is a list of HPC systems which are available at SES institutions. For a list of national facilities, please visit HPC UK.
- Oxford Advanced Research Computing (ARC) is the central HPC service for the University of Oxford
- UCL Research IT Services provide access to high performance computing platforms, software and research applications, HPC training and support. UCL is now an NVIDIA GPU Research Centre.
- Southampton HPC machine, Iridis, which is used by university researchers who are limited by the computing capability of their desktop PC.
- Imperial HPC
- QMUL’s HPC cluster, Apocrita, is run by the ITS Research Group
- King’s College London’s first system in their HPC cluster is Ada, run in conjunction with the Faculty of Natural & Mathematical Sciences.
In early 2015, SES released a report on the barriers to using research HPC experienced by UK industry based on our work with organisations and their demand for higher compute power. The consortium is committed to exploring how boundaries to working with business can be lowered – more information can be found in ‘High Performance Computing for Industry: The Case of the Centre for Innovation’.
