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.

Machine details

Current machines

• ARC3 (EOL 2021?) ..* 6336 cores, 26 GPUs and 2 Xeon Phi "Knights Landing" for general use ..* 888 cores and 18 GPUs (2017 vintage) owned by research groups in FBS, ENV, MAPS
• ARC2 (EOL 2019?) ..* 3040 cores for general use ..* 2352 cores (various 2010-2015 vintages) owned by research groups in ENG, ENV, MAPS
• MARC1 (EOL 2019?) ..* 1236 cores owned by LIDA research groups in MEDH, ENV

Previous major procurements

• 2009 (ARC1, Sun) - 445 gbp/core [240 nodes / 1888+64 cores / 869565.21 gbp]
• 2010 (MHD, HP) - 362 gbp/core [160 nodes / 1920 cores / 695175 gbp]
• 2012 (N8HPC, SGI) - 463 gbp/core [332 nodes / 5312 cores / 2459060.40 gbp]
• 2013 (ARC2, HP) - 329 gbp/core [190 nodes / 3040 cores / 999600 gbp]
• 2014 (HERC1, SGI) - ? gbp/core [1 node / 256 cores / ? gbp]
• 2015 (MARC1, HP) - 614 gbp/core [98 nodes / 1236 cores / 758936.16 gbp]
• 2016 (ARC3, Dell) - 302 gbp/core [167 nodes (4008 cores) + 2 GPU nodes(4 GPUs) => cost equiv to "96" std cores / 1239348.0 gbp]
• 2017 (ARC3.5, Dell) - 295 gbp/core [121 nodes (2904 cores) + 6 GPU nodes(24 GPUs) => cost equiv to "576" std cores / 1027606.42 gbp ]

Regional High Performance Computing

• We have also been running an additional 5,312 cores as a regional machine on behalf of the N8 Research Partnership (soon to be decommissioned)
• 500 external users of the N8 machine.
• Also has 192 cores owned by a research group in MAPS

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