It seems strange to be thinking about how to justify investment in ARCHER3 and beyond, with ARCHER2 not fully in service yet, but it is never too early to start planning this. ARCHER generated a significant amount of world-leading science and we fully anticipate ARCHER2 will as well. It is important to capture this to justify investment in future national services. We did this for ARCHER and produced data twice a year primarily from SAFE, but also involving machine statistics and information about services provided such as training and eCSE. This wasn’t something that the user community would have necessarily been aware of, but was covered in the data and privacy policies for ARCHER. Data provided was never individual but cumulative across the service.
It’s been a busy week at the Advanced Computing Facility (ACF) with the arrival of the remaining ARCHER2 cabinets. The long journey started from the HPE Cray factory in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin (birthtown of Seymour Cray) before arriving in Prestwick airport. It took three separate journeys of four lorries to transport all of the cabinets to Edinburgh.
The ARCHER2 Service is a world class advanced computing resource for UK researchers. ARCHER2 is provided by UKRI, EPCC, HPE Cray and the University of Edinburgh.
ARCHER2 is currently running as a small early access system while the full system is being commissioned.
