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, provided by the ARCHER2 service partners.

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. More information on ARCHER2 hardware and 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.

## ARCHER2 Objectives

ARCHER2 is primarily a vehicle for delivering high-quality research outputs. As such, all our service activities ultimately support that key objective. We ensure that the activities of all elements of the service support the user community and so contribute to the delivery of world-leading research.

As Service Provider, EPCC coordinates and interfaces with all the elements of the Service to ensure good co-operation and clearly defined responsibilities. All service partners work together to ensure that the ARCHER2 service matches users’ evolving needs.

Key characteristics of the ARCHER service are:

A more detailed description of the ARCHER2 service can be found in the ARCHER2 Service Description paper.