Access to HPC Wales’ supercomputing services

Bangor University is a partner of High Performance Computing (HPC) Wales*, an innovative collaboration which gives businesses and researchers access to world-class, secure and easy to use high performance computing (HPC) technology.

For academic staff at Bangor, HPC Wales offers a number of opportunities to enhance research output and collaboration:

Access to world-class high performance computing
Technical support to help you get your projects onto the system
Mentoring and outreach support to help you develop relationships with commercial organisations
Support to bring users who are totally new to computational science up to speed with high performance computing
Related training and opportunities to build skills
Access to postgraduate research studentships and bursaries

HPC Resource

HPC Wales’ Phase 1 infrastructure, delivering a fully functional distributed network, is complete and will soon be fully operational.

The local machine at Bangor is operational, and comprises of 648 Intel Xeon (Westmere) 2.66GHz cores, nearly 2TB of memory and 10 Tbyte of local storage. However, access to the entire HPC Wales system, including larger systems for heavy production work, can be achieved either through direct login over a dedicated high performance campus network connection, or via Synfiniway which provides a web-based, graphical interface that is ideal for users who are new to high performance computing.

Technical Support and Assistance

HPC Wales have a staff member based full time at Bangor who is responsible for the physical operation of the Bangor-based hardware, shared management of the pan-Wales infrastructure and providing support for users of all ability levels as they come onto the system.

For a discussion about any technical aspects of HPC Wales’ services please contact Ade Fewings

Mentoring and Outreach Support

Each project that applies to use HPC Wales’ facilities needs to make a contribution to HPC Wales’ output targets by having an association with an appropriate collaborator, usually an SME with an operation base in the West Wales and Valleys Convergence region.

Laura Redfern can help with building relationships with local companies and organisations which can directly benefit you and your research.

Bryn Jones in the Research and Innovation Office can also help with this process.

Users New to Computational Science

There are areas of research where the linkage to computational science is not obvious, but where considerable benefit can be realised by using high performance computing in innovative ways. We will be developing and working through a variety of routes to identify such users, but in the meantime if you have any interest in finding out more about HPC Wales, please do not hesitate to get in touch with any of the contacts listed above.

Further Information

Please re-visit this website for further information on HPC opportunities and activity here at Bangor. It will be regularly updated.
Further information on HPC Wales and the services available across Wales can be found on the company’s website: www.hpcwales.co.uk

*HPC Wales is part-funded by the European Regional Development Fund through the Welsh Government

Publication date: 18 July 2012