Key facts and figures about Research Computing at Leeds

Training

• 40.5 training days delivered in 2017-18 academic year, providing ~630 researcher training days.
• 6 two-day Software Carpentry or Data Carpentry workshops providing training opportunities to a further 108 researchers in a range of computational and data science skills.

Local High Performance Computing

• We have over 14,000 processor cores with a total 50Tb RAM and 46 GPUs for use by University of Leeds researchers
• There are just under 1,000 University of Leeds users (Approximately 1/3 of our resarch population)
• We now have about 2-3 times the number of active users of the ARC service than we did 5 years ago. Since investment in both people and equipment has remained static, the amount of support and resource available per researcher has dropped.
• We are probably heading for a contraction in the number of cores next year as quite of kit is getting old and we have insufficient investment to replace at a similar level.

Regional High Performance Computing

• We have also been running an additional 5,500 cores as a regional machine on behalf of the N8 Research Partnership (soon to be decommissioned)
• 500 external users of the N8 machine.

Integrated Research Campus

• The IRC provides trained and authorised researchers with monitored access to datasets which they can manipulate and analyse. Using a safe haven that prevents unauthorised copying, with RSA 2-Factor secure ID authentication technology.
• With 640 cores (600 useable) with 3.52TB RAM (2.64TB useable) and 1.79PB Storage (716TB useable) compute infrastructure.
• Citrix virtual research environment (VRE) with integrated research applications and tools including; Python, R, Stata and Microsoft SQL Server, plus many more.
• ISO 27001 certification