The call is now out for the annual end-of-financial-year CSF (Central Shared Facility) procurement. If your research group has funds and wishes to make a contribution, this University financial year, to the CSF, please get in touch as soon as possible.

The popular Computational Shared Facility (CSF) has recently hit a significant milestone with the 1-millionth job being submitted.

The CSF (Computational Shared Facility) and DPSF (Data Processing Shared Facility), the University's flagship HPC systems for compute and high memory work, have been steadily growing over the past 7 years. Approximately 4 million pounds have been invested resulting in over 10,000 CPU cores, over 1PB of scratch and 60TB of RAM being available.

The Computational Shared Facility (CSF) has now officially come of age - it has reached an amazing 10,000 CPU cores - with around 4000 cores of Haswell / Broadwell and a Skylake procurement coming up in January.

Our flagship computational facility, The CSF, is currently only available to those researchers contributing funds to the platform. However we are pleased to announce that our recent case to provide limited free-at-the-point-of-use computational resource to users without funds, particularly for those who are not computational specialists, has been successful.

The Data-Processing Shared Facility (DPSF) is now available to early-adopters. The DPSF is a new computational platform (developed from Hydra) which is complementary to the highly-successful Computational Shared Facility (CSF) which has been in production for several years: The DPSF is specified for high-memory and IO-intensive work.

For important security-related reasons, University of Manchester computational platforms are not accessible directly from outside the campus, nor can UoM platforms directly access Web and FTP sites which are off-campus.

The University end of financial year is not far away! As usual, Research IT anticipate making a procurement for the Computational Shared Facility (CSF) and other Research Infrastructure platforms at this time.

By the time you read this, there will be 96 Infiniband-connected Intel Haswell-based nodes in the Computational Shared Facility (CSF), equivalent to over 2,300 cores. The CSF total core count will be over 8,000.