ARCHER2 is the UK National Supercomputing Service, a world class advanced computing resource for UK researchers. ARCHER2 is provided by UKRI, EPCC, HPE Cray and the University of Edinburgh. ARCHER2 Website
Extensive free online training materials for HPC are available at https://www.archer2.ac.uk/training/materials/
UK researchers must apply for time on ARCHER2 but it is possible to gain temporary access with free CPU or GPU credits by passing the ARCHER2 driving test
Funding for the service is regularly reviewed and the current ARCHER2 service end date is 21st November 2026. Please check News & Announcements for updates.
Bede has had support extended to March 2026. It is currently unknown if the service will continue past that time. Please plan any use of the Bede HPC facility accordingly.
Newcastle is a member of the N8 Centre of Excellence in Computationally Intensive Research (N8 CIR). Through this membership Newcastle researchers have access to a new GPU focused HPC machine.
Bede comprises of 32 IBM Power 9 dual-CPU nodes, each with 4 NVIDIA V100 GPUs and high-performance interconnect. This is the same architecture as the US government’s SUMMIT and SIERRA supercomputers which occupied the top two places in a recently published list of the world’s fastest supercomputers.
Bede is the first supercomputer in the UK to make use of IBM’s Power IC922 server; making use of 6 additional nodes with NVIDIA T4 Tensor Core GPU Accelerators to improve AI inference.
More information on Bede can be found on the N8 CIR website. If you want to make use of Bede's supercomputing capabilities, have a look at their documentation page and find out how to get support.
Local support at Newcastle University for Bede users is provided by the Research Software Engineering team.
DiRAC (Distributed Research utilizing Advanced Computing) HPC facility primarily serves the UK theory and modeling communities in particle physics, astrophysics, cosmology, solar system physics, and nuclear physics. This includes researchers working on STFC Science Challenges. Access is granted through the STFC's Resource Allocation Committee (RAC).
Information on getting access to DIRAC facilities can be found at https://dirac.ac.uk/getting-access/ Training is available to regisered users at https://training-academy.dirac.ac.uk/
The JADE2 national Tier 2 HPC GPU facility closed in late 2024. Further access is no longer possible.
JADE2 was an EPSRC-funded Tier 2 regional High-Performance Computing Cluster based on GPUs. It was intended to be used to support Artificial Intelligence Research only. The computing nodes were based on NVIDIA DGX MAX-Q Deep Learning System platform. The cluster had 63 servers, each containing 8 NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs linked by NVIDIA’s NV link interconnects technology. Newcastle University was a member of the consortium of institutions sharing this resource.
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