Facilities

Digital Research Services at the University of Nottingham manage access to the on premises high performance compute service Augusta. Our group makes use fo this resource for production calculations, supporting the majority of our publications. The machine presently has 4,720 cores, 31 TB of RAM, 6 GPU’s and 750 TB of storage available to researchers across the university.

The MidPlus regional High Performance Computing (HPC) resource was created in January 2012 with an investment of £2 million from EPSRC (through the E-infrastructure Interconnectivity call) and £1.5 million from the four partners – University of Warwick, University of Birmingham, University of Nottingham and Queen Mary, University of London. Access to these facilities is managed by quarterly calls and can provide larger scale compute with dedicated allocation of CPU hours.

Since much of our research centres on method development access to ‘instant on’ resources is essential. Our group cluster Hartree supports this work with 10 compute nodes. Initially supported by a Royal Society Equipment Grant and recently by the ERC project topDFT, Hartree now has 592 AMD based compute cores with 256Gb of memory on each node. One node is dedicated to push triggered and nightly testing of our code base via a GitLab CI runner.

The computational chemistry supergroup maintains some compute provision for testing and development as well as training for year 4 research project students. This cluster is hosted in the School of Chemistry and provides a joint resource for all of the computational groups.