Research IT

Tier-2 HPC Applications Open Now

EPSRC is offering open access to five new Tier-2 High Performance Computing facilities through a call for proposals. Free access to the facilities is through a two stage peer review process with an initial closing date of the 21st of September. There will only be three calls a year for access to the facilities.

The five facilities users can access through this call are:

  • Cirrus HPC System – 10,000 core system based on Intel Xeon Broadwell
  • GW4 – Test bed for emerging architectures including ARM, GPU and Xeon Phi
  • CSD3 – 24,000 cores of Intel Xeon Skylake, 342 Intel Xeon Phi and 360 NVidia GPUs
  • HPC Midlands - 14,336 core system based on the Intel Xeon processor
  • National GPU facility JADE – 22 NVIDIA DGX-1 Deep Learning systems

Further details on each of these systems can be found in the call document.

The aim of the call is to provide access to the national Tier-2 HPC facilities for adventurous high-risk, high-reward projects that will benefit from the diversity of computing architectures available at Tier-2.

A non-exclusive list of eligible projects includes:

  • Short computational projects that do not warrant a full grant application;
  • UK led collaborative projects with international and/or industry partners;
  • Joint applications from students (as Co-Is) with proven HPC experience and their PIs;
  • Projects that link consecutive standard grant applications or that aid the preparation of a grant or fellowship application;
  • Extended feasibility studies and trialling application developments at scale;
  • High-risk, high-reward projects that would benefit from using novel architectures.

If you are interested in applying then we are happy to help you with your application so please get in touch. If you do apply for access to a Tier 2 resource please let us know the outcome of your application so we can ensure that UoM researchers are getting the most from this new resource.