Our HPC facilities at Newcastle University have different access and funding models. Some of our facilities operate under a split free-access / funded-access model where a certain amount of resources are reserved for users without funding or who are working on activity to pump-prime further projects.
As a result, whilst everyone is able to access the HPC facilities, in order to access the larger pool of resources in several of our facilities, you will need to allocate funding using the standard University TRAC system for HPC services.
Newcastle University has offered a number of HPC facilities to our research community. Their status is shown below.
| Facility | Status | Description |
|---|---|---|
Rocket |
Decommissioning | Rocket is an HPC service used by Newcastle University. It was introduced in 2017 as the first institution-wide HPC facility, and is open to all staff and students, regardless of funding. Rocket is primarily used for CPU-based compute, although has a small amount of GPU resources. There are no priority queues or resources implemented on Rocket - all users and projects have equal access to all available nodes, with everyone being subject to a 'fair use' policy. |
Comet |
Operational | Comet is the replacement for the previous Rocket facility. It builds upon the capabilities of Rocket by offering a significantly increased set of CPU resources, increased memory limits and additional GPU resources. The Comet facility also introduces, for the first time at Newcastle, container based job support and the ability to run compute-intensive graphical applications through Open OnDemand. Comet was brought online for the Newcastle University HPC community in late 2025 through an academic-lead design and procurement process. |
If you understand the type of resource your computation requires then you can select it from the list below and generate a costing for your project or research activity.
You can also jump straight to the costing tool if needed
Note: You must be logged in to access the costing tool.
| Facility | Status | Resource Type | Nodes | Unfunded Use | CPU | CPU Arch | Cores/Node | Cores/Total | Frequency | RAM/Node | GPU/Node | GPU/Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rocket | Decommissioning | Power.a | 1 | 100% | 2x IBM Power 9 | Power | 32 | 32 | 2600 - 3090 MHz | 256 GB | 4x Nvidia Tesla V100 (16 GB) | 4 |
| Rocket | Decommissioning | Standard.a | 110 | 100% | 2x Intel Xeon E5-2699 v4 | x86_64 | 44 | 4840 | 2200 - 3600 MHz | 128 GB | - | - |
| Rocket | Decommissioning | Medium.a | 6 | 100% | 2x Intel Xeon E5-2699 v4 | x86_64 | 44 | 264 | 2200 - 3600 MHz | 512 GB | - | - |
| Rocket | Decommissioning | Large.a | 4 | 100% | 2x Intel Xeon E5-2699 v4 | x86_64 | 44 | 176 | 2200 - 3600 MHz | 512 GB | - | - |
| Rocket | Decommissioning | XL.a | 2 | 100% | 4x Intel Xeon E7-4830 v4 | x86_64 | 56 | 112 | 2000 - 2200 MHz | 1536 GB | - | - |
| Comet | Operational | Standard.b | 36 | 20% | 2x AMD EPYC 9745 | x86_64 | 256 | 9216 | 2400 - 3700 MHz | 1152 GB | - | - |
| Comet | Operational | Large.b | 10 | 25% | 2x AMD EPYC 9745 | x86_64 | 256 | 2560 | 2400 - 3700 MHz | 1536 GB | - | - |
| Comet | Operational | Standard.Lowlatency | 4 | 25% | 2x AMD EPYC 9745 | x86_64 | 256 | 1024 | 2400 - 3700 MHz | 1152 GB | - | - |
| Comet | Operational | GPU-S | 4 | 25% | 2x AMD EPYC 9745 | x86_64 | 256 | 1024 | 2400 - 3700 MHz | 768 GB | 8x Nvidia L40S (48 GB) | 32 |
| Comet | Operational | GPU-L | 1 | 0% | 2x AMD EPYC 9745 | x86_64 | 256 | 256 | 2400 - 3700 MHz | 768 GB | 4x Nvidia H100 (96 GB) | 4 |
| Rocket | Decommissioning | Dell-GPU.a | 1 | 100% | 2x Intel Xeon Gold 6242 | x86_64 | 32 | 32 | 2800 - 3900 MHz | 1536 GB | 1x Nvidia Quadro RTX 6000/8000 (48 GB) | 1 |