Research Computing Platforms
The Research Computing Platforms (RCP) team provides facilities and support for people, across the University, engaged in computationally demanding research. Our services are overseen by academic steering groups, and the systems we provide:
- can run large and small simulations and data analyses
- have the capability to tackle problems difficult or impossible to run on most laptops or desktops
- have the capacity to run many tasks at once, for many people
The support we provide assists people to get the most from these systems, including training, advice, troubleshooting and installing additional software.
We currently operate the following facilities:
Hamilton HPC Service
ARC is responsible for Durham University’s high performance computing (HPC) service, which can be used by researchers in all departments. See https://www.dur.ac.uk/arc/hamilton/ for information on how to get access and use this facility.
Contact: Mark Dixon
N8CIR/Bede HPC GPU Service
The N8 Centre of Excellence in Computationally Intensive Research (N8CIR) has a facility suitable for large-scale computation with GPUs, hosted at Durham University and managed by ARC. It is available for use by researchers in all departments. See Bede for information on how to get access and use this machine.
Contact: Mark Dixon
Other HPC and GPU Platforms
There are a number of Linux and GPU computing systems run by other departments in the university. Some are available for staff in certain groups or departments only, others are potentially available to a wider group of users. The following list is not comprehensive.
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NVIDIA CUDA Centre (Computer Science)
Website: http://community.dur.ac.uk/ncc.admin/
Contact: Rob Powell
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Hardware Testbedds (Physics/Computer Science)
Website: https://testbeds.webspace.durham.ac.uk/
Contact: Alastair Basden, Tobias Weinzierl
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COSMA (Physics/Cosmology)
A DiRAC facility, see https://www.dur.ac.uk/icc/cosma/dirac/
Website: http://icc.dur.ac.uk/index.php?content=Computing/Cosma
Contact: Alastair Basden
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Condor (Mathematics)
Only for members of the Department of Mathematical Sciences
Contact: Bernard Piette
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IPPP Batch (Physics/IPPP)
Only for members of the Members of the IPPP and Physics for CPU and GPU intensive workloads.
Contact: Adam Boutcher / Paul Clark
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GRID (Physics/IPPP)
A GridPP facility, see https://www.gridpp.ac.uk/
Website: https://www.phenogrid.dur.ac.uk/
Contact: Adam Boutcher / Paul Clark