On-demand computing and data solutions for industry at EPCC
27 August 2020
Cirrus is a Tier-2 state-of-the-art advanced computing facility available to industry and academia. Hosted and managed by EPCC, it provides an ideal platform for solving computational, simulation, modelling, and data science challenges.
The system was recently upgraded via a £3.5m funding award from the UK's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. This included the addition of 144 NVIDIA V100 GPUs and a 256TB high-performance storage layer for the most demanding data-streaming applications.
Industry benefits
Cirrus is available to industry on a pay-per-use basis, and is regularly used to solve CFD and FEA simulation and modelling problems in sectors such as automotive, aerospace, energy, oil and gas, general engineering, life sciences, and financial services.
The additional 144 GPUs will provide a key resource for users to explore programming frameworks and accelerated versions of existing applications, in addition to supporting the exponential growth in artificial intelligence and machine learning data science projects.
Through a simple internet connection, users gain cost-effective access to Cirrus where they can run their own codes and access a range of commercial software tools.
Pricing
Costs for industrial users of Cirrus:
• CPU £0.0369 per core hour used
• GPU £2.0357 per GPU hour used.
Disk storage up to 1 TB is provided at no cost.