Introduction

The High End Computing (HEC) Cluster is a centrally-run service to support researchers and research students at Lancaster who require high performance and high throughput computing. This includes computing workloads with requirements that can’t be met by the Interactive Unix Service (IUS), desktop PCs or Virtual Desktops (mydesktop and mylab).

The service combines what was the previously separately supported services for local high performance computing (HPC) users and the local Particle Physics research group (GridPP). The combined facility offers 14,000 cores, 61TB of aggregate memory, 24 NVidia V100 GPUs, 8 NVidia L40 GPUs, 230TB of GPFS-based filestore for general use and 10PB of Ceph-based filestore for GridPP data.

The cluster operating system is Rocky Linux 8, with job submission handled by the SLURM Workload Manager. The service supports a wide variety of third-party software including popular research applications, numerical packages, libraries and C and Fortran compilers.

The HEC is funded through a combination of central funding and contributions from individual research grants.