ARCHER national supercomputing service

ARCHER (Advanced Research Computing High End Resource) is the UK’s primary academic research supercomputer.

The £43m ARCHER service enables UK researchers to carry out internationally-competitive work, so supporting the UK's status as a leader in computational science and engineering. ARCHER, a Cray XC30, is housed at the University of Edinburgh’s Advanced Computing Facility (ACF).

Access to ARCHER

There are a range of ways to access ARCHER for your research depending on your work:

• University of Edinburgh researchers - EPCC runs calls for access (link only accessible to University of Edinburgh researchers)
• Academic researchers - The ARCHER website lists access routes
• Commercial organisations - EPCC provides access

The ARCHER service

The service, which began in 2014 and will run for at least 4 years, comprises a number of components:

• User and computational science and engineering support, including training (EPCC)
• Accommodation (University of Edinburgh)
• Hardware (Cray)
• ​Systems support (EPCC and Daresbury Laboratory).

Support for science

Computational science & engineering support

Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) support on ARCHER is provided by EPCC. It includes responsibility for helping users with porting, optimising and developing their codes for ARCHER, ensuring that the correct scientific software is installed on the system to meet user requirements, providing advice and best practices to enable users to exploit ARCHER resources, and training and developing scientific software expertise among UK researchers.

Training to address the needs of different research communities will be provided across the UK through links with the HPC Special Interest Group, HPC Wales, and the STFC's Daresbury Laboratory. Courses have already been run or are planned at: London, Leeds, Bristol, Belfast, Daresbury, Wales, York, Oxford and Southampton.

Embedded CSE (eCSE) programme

Through a series of regular calls, eCSE support provides funding to the ARCHER user community to develop software in a sustainable manner for running on ARCHER. Funding enables the employment of a researcher or code developer to work specifically on the relevant software to enable new features or improve the performance of the code.

ARCHER Technical Forum

The Technical Forum is open to all ARCHER users and non-users who are interested in technical discussions about HPC. It comprises a series of monthly webinar meetings, with a wide range of technical experts invited to speak and attend, and a public mailing list for technical discussion.

Access to ARCHER

• Access via a UK research council.
• Access for commercial organisations.

Any enquiries about using ARCHER should be sent to the ARCHER Helpdesk.

Hardware

The ARCHER facility is based around a Cray XC30 supercomputer that provides the central computational resource. It is supported by a number of additional components including: high-performance parallel filesystems, pre- and post-processing facilities, external login nodes, and a large, resilient, long-term data facility.

You can read more on the hardware section of the ARCHER website.

Further information

ARCHER website

ARCHER Helpdesk: the first point of contact for all questions relating to the ARCHER Service. Support is available Monday to Friday from 08:30 until 18:00, excluding UK public holidays.

Twitter: ARCHER; EPCC

EPSRC press release

EPSRC is the managing agent for the ARCHER HPC facility on behalf of all theUK Research Councils.