ARCHER2

ARCHER2 serves as the UK’s National High Performance Computing system and facilitates world-class science for UK researchers.

ARCHER2 full system 2021

ARCHER2 is an HPE Cray EX supercomputing system with an estimated peak performance of 28 PFLOP/s. The machine has 5,860 compute nodes, each with dual AMD EPYCTM 7742 64 core CPUs at 2.2GHz, giving 748,544 cores in total.

ARCHER2 is capable, on average, of over eleven times the science throughput of its predecessor, ARCHER (hosted at EPCC from 2013 to 2021). This estimate is based on benchmarks of five of the most heavily used research software packages on ARCHER.

As with all new systems, the relative speedups over ARCHER vary by software and problem size. The research software applications used for the benchmarking evaluation are estimated to improve science throughput by the following factors: 

  • 8.7x for CP2K
  • 9.5x for OpenSBLI
  • 11.3x for CASTEP
  • 12.9x for GROMACS
  • 18.0x for the HadGEM3 climate model

Technology

# Nodes
5860 Compute nodes: 5568 standard memory (256GB) , 292 high memory (512GB)

CPUs
2× AMD EPYCTM 7742, 2.25 GHz, 64-core per node

Total CPU cores
750,080

GPUs

AMD GPU Testbed System attached to ARCHER2. 
16 GPUs: 4 nodes each with 4 AMD MI210 GPUs connected by Slingshot interconnect.

Other key technology or accelerator details
The system includes a 1PB burst-buffer NVMe storage system

System Memory details
Total of 1.57 PB of RAM

Storage technologies and specs
14.5PB of high speed “work” HPE Cray ClusterStor
1PB of backed up “home” NetApp FAS8200
1PB of burst buffer NVMe HPE Cray ClusterStor

Interconnect technologies and specs
HPE Cray Slingshot, 2× 100 Gbps bi-directional per node

Layout/physical system scale
ARCHER2 is composed of 23 HPE Cray EX “Mountain” cabinets as well as a support row of 9 air cooled racks for system management and storage.

Cooling tech and specs
The ARCHER2 Compute Nodes are stored in water cooled HPE Cray EX “Mountain” cabinets.

Scheduler details
Slurm

System OS details
HPE Cray Linux Environment (based on SLES 15)

Science and applications

ARCHER2 covers a wide range of sciences including Physics, Chemistry, Engineering and the Environmental Sciences.

Examples of science on ARCHER2 can be found on the ARCHER2 website.

Access

Academic access

The ARCHER2 service is a world-class advanced computing resource for UK researchers. For such researchers, there are specific allocation mechanisms for requesting ARCHER2 time via the ARCHER2 partner research councils EPSRC and NERC as detailed below. 

For researchers in other areas, please get in touch with your research council if you would like to use ARCHER2.

Details of academic access to ARCHER2 can be found on the ARCHER2 website.

Commercial access

On-demand access to the ARCHER2 National Supercomputing Service is available for industry users. 

Further details of commercial access to ARCHER2 can be found on the ARCHER2 website.

For more information, please contact Julien Sindt, EPCC Commercial Manager:  j.sindt@epcc.ed.ac.uk

Trial access

Details of trial access routes to ARCHER2 can be found on the ARCHER2 website

People

The service director for ARCHER2 is Alan Simpson. The system is maintained by the Service Desk, Computational Support and Engineering and HPC Systems Teams within EPCC and the hardware provider HPE.

Support 

The ARCHER2 Service Desk is the first point of contact for all questions relating to the ARCHER2 Service. Support is available Monday to Friday from 08:00 until 18:00 UK time, excluding UK public holidays.