LECTURE: The HPC landscape in the EU and UK

Overview

Teaching: 30 min
Exercises: 0 min

Questions

• What HPC resources are available in the EU and in the UK?

• What are the different tiers of HPC facilities, and what does this mean?

Objectives

HPC in the EU and UK

HPC facilities are divided into tiers, with larger HPC systems being cateforised in higher tiers. In the UK, there are 3 tiers of supercompters:

• Tier 3 facilities are university supercomputers, and are aimed at helping researchers within given institutions only.
• Tier 2 facilities are a bit harder to define. Traditionally, they are regional facilities, but this is less and less the case.
  • These are here to fill the gap between the university Tier 3 systems and the national Tier 1 systems.
  • They can be highly specialised (e.g. JADE is a GPU-only machine specifically targeting machine learning research (though other research can also be done on it).
• Tier 1 facilities are nationally-leading centres (like ARCHER2). There is usually one or two per country.
• Tier 0 systems are petaflop systems, and the best across a continent. PRACE provides access to 7 systems, including two Tier 0.
  • Newer EU machines being delivered under EuroHPC Joint Undertaking

Key Points

• You can find more about the state of HPC in the UK here

• You can learn more about HPC facilities across Europe on the PRACE and EuroHPC websites