Cirrus

Cirrus is a state-of-the-art HPC system running industry-standard Linux that provides an ideal platform for users to solve their computational simulation and modelling challenges.

Users are able to run their own codes as well as accessing a range of commercial software tools. These are accessed on an on-demand, pay-per-use basis and used to solve CFD and FEA simulation and modelling problems in sectors such as:

• Automotive
• Aerospace
• Energy
• Oil and gas
• General engineering
• Life sciences
• Financial services

Cirrus is currently undergoing a hardware refresh with the hardware described below available to users in early December 2025.

Technology

# Nodes
256 CPU nodes

CPUs
CPU Nodes: 2x AMD EPYC® 9825, 2.25 GHz, 144-core processors – 288 cores per node in total

Total CPU cores
73,728 cores

System Memory details
CPU Nodes:

• 768 GB per standard memory node (192 nodes)
• 1,536 GB per high memory node (64 nodes)

Storage technologies
1PB Ceph distributed file system for critical data storage.

1PB HPE E1000 ClusterStor Lustre parallel file system provides high performance data access with high capacity.

Interconnect technologies and specs
HPE Cray Slingshot 11, 200 Gbps per node

Layout/Physical system scale
Cirrus is composed of 1 HPE Cray EX4000 cabinet as well as 1 support cabinet for system management and storage and a Cooling Distribution Unit

Cooling tech and specs
The Cirrus compute nodes are stored in a water cooled HPE Cray EX4000 cabinet

Scheduler details
Slurm

System OS Details
Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Science and applications

Cirrus provides an ideal platform for solving computational, simulation, modelling, and data science challenges. Work on Cirrus covers a wide range of fields including physics, chemistry and engineering.

Access

Academic access

Academic access to Cirrus is available to UK-based academics. Special arrangements for access to Cirrus are available for University of Edinburgh researchers.  

Details of academic access routes are available on the Cirrus website.

Please contact the service desk if you have any questions regarding access: support@cirrus.ac.uk 

Commercial access

Cirrus has been designed to support a wide range of industry applications and EPCC can provide both access to HPC resources and also consultancy to effectively exploit HPC resources.

For access to Cirrus and EPCC expertise please contact support@cirrus.ac.uk.

Trial access

Details of access are available on the Cirrus website.

People

The key management staff for Cirrus are:

• Prof. Mark Parsons (Service Director)
• Ms Josephine Beech-Brandt (Deputy Service Director)
• Dr Andy Turner (Service Owner)

Support

System maintenance and provision are provided by the Service Desk, Computational Support and Engineering and HPC Systems Team within EPCC and the hardware provider HPE.

Support is available Monday to Friday from 08:00 until 18:00 UK time (excluding UK public holidays) via support@cirrus.ac.uk.