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.
- Hardware provided by HPE
- Service Provision (SP) support provided by EPCC
- Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) support provided by EPCC
- 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. 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:
- User-focused: The service is user-focused, flexible and responsive to users’ continually evolving needs.
- Experienced: The service is delivered by high-quality staff with a wide range of knowledge, experience of national HPC services, and respected standing within the worldwide HPC ecosystem.
- Committed: All service partners have long-standing commitments to providing high-quality national HPC services that facilitate world-leading science.
- Collaborative: The service engages with the whole UK HPC community through an open and inclusive approach to service delivery, supported by our strong existing links into the wider community.
- High quality: The service is underpinned by certified Quality Management processes (ISO9001) and Information Security policies (ISO27001).
- Sustainable: The service is committed to understanding, tracking, and minimising our emissions and environmental impact.
- Approachable, accessible and inclusive: We take a holistic approach to support recognising and respecting the diversity of needs across the community.
- Flexible and adaptable: Drawing on a large pool of experienced staff, the service adapts to changing requirements and technical needs, variable levels of demand, and to external forces.
- Available and timely: The service is staffed by experienced individuals with a large amount of technical knowledge.
- Open and responsive: The service proactively solicits feedback from the user community and acts on it in an appropriate way to continually improve the service.
A more detailed description of the ARCHER2 service can be found in the ARCHER2 Service Description paper.