ARCHER2 Service Description

ARCHER2 is the latest iteration of the UK National Supercomputing Service. The ARCHER2 service aims to provide a flexible and responsive resource to support world-class research in the UK; to improve the skill sets of researchers and RSEs to equip them for the future; to improve the sustainability, maintainability of the HPC software base; and to enable collaboration and outreach to the wider, worldwide HPC community and beyond. The service consists of four main components: hardware provided by HPE, Service Provision (SP) support provided by EPCC, Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) support provided by EPCC, and hosting provided by the University of Edinburgh. The hardware from HPE provides the computational resource around which the service is built, it is a HPE Cray EX system with 5,860 compute nodes each with two AMD 7420 64-core processors and 256 GB or 512 GB DDR4 RAM. Compute nodes are connected using a HPE Cray Slingshot 10 interconnect in a dragonfly topology. There are 750,080 CPU cores available to researchers on ARCHER2 along with over 15 PB of storage and an extensive suite of modelling and simulation packages and supporting software. The EPCC SP support provides system administration, user and project management, and service desk management. The EPCC CSE support provides in-depth technical support for users, extensive training, embedded CSE support to fund software development, and outreach to the wider public. Hosting from University of Edinburgh provides the physical infrastructure to host the ARCHER2 system and networking to connect it to the outside world.