High Performance Computing
High-Performance Computing (HPC) provides researchers with the ability to expand their data processing, simulation and computation across hundreds of cores.
The ITS Research team support, and provide access to Apocrita, which is a heterogeneous HPC cluster comprising around 350 nodes and 13,000 compute cores, based in a co-located datacentre in North London.
The cluster has many applications installed ready for you to use; core applications (including Stata, Gaussian and MATLAB); programming languages (e.g. C, C++, Fortran, R, Python); and domain-specific research applications (e.g. for bioinformatics and computational chemistry). A more detailed list of applications and languages is available
Why use HPC
Using an HPC cluster can substantially reduce the time taken to compute problems by running analyses in parallel or breaking them up into pieces. Both strategies allow for the problem to be worked on by many separate compute cores (CPUs) at the same time. Any Researcher who commonly finds themselves regularly performing computational work on their machine should consider moving their workflow to the HPC Cluster, where you can significantly increase analysis throughput, or enable computations which are not feasible on a standard desktop machine while utilising a scalable, backed-up storage system to store your research data.
The Apocrita system has been specifically designed to meet the needs of a wide variety of research in the areas of our three faculties, including GPU nodes to facilitate Machine Learning workloads, low latency Infiniband networking for parallel jobs favoured by astronomy and computational chemistry, plus high-performance storage to aid genomic analyses.
How to Access the HPC cluster
New cluster accounts for eligible users can be requested on the documentation site
There are also sections on how to log in, change your password, and example job scripts.