HPC Clusters

An HPC Cluster is a group of individual computer systems interconnected by a shared network for the purposes of carrying out High Performance Computing and High Throughput Computing.

The main features of our HPC Clusters are:

  • Multiple compute ‘nodes of relatively low cost hardware
  • x86_64 CPU architecture
  • CentOS Linux v7
  • Gbit/10Gbit ethernet interconnect
  • Common storage visible to all compute nodes
  • Workload scheduler (SLURM)
  • Multiple job execution queues
  • Shared software repositories (> 200 bioinformatics codes and libraries)
  • Virtualised login nodes for user access and job submission

We currently manage a cluster estate of ca 3500 cores, directly connected to our EMC Isilon shared storage system.