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04 March 2021
Anne Whiting (EPCC)
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...
19 February 2021
Josephine Beech-Brandt (EPCC)
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...
11 February 2021
Clair Barrass (EPCC)
Having said Farewell to ARCHER, we invite you to try our short quiz, to see how much you can remember about the service.
09 February 2021
Catherine Inglis (EPCC)
The ARCHER2 eCSE programme provides funding to carry out development of software used by the ARCHER2 user community. As part of our commitment to encouraging and developing Early Career Researchers, we offer a small number of early career researchers the opportunity to attend the eCSE Panel Meeting as observers. The...
05 February 2021
Josephine Beech-Brandt (EPCC)
Last week marked the end of the ARCHER Service after seven years. You may have heard some statistics over the last week about ARCHER but I wanted to tell you some from the helpdesk. During the lifetime of ARCHER, the User Support and Systems teams (SP) have resolved 57,489 contractual...
04 February 2021
Andy Turner (EPCC)
Now that the ARCHER service has finished, I thought it would be interesting to take a brief look at the use of different research software on the service over its lifetime. ARCHER was in service for over 7 years: from late 2013 until its shutdown in early 2021. Over the...
03 February 2021
Clair Barrass (EPCC)
Back in February 2015, a little over a year after the ARCHER service began, EPCC launched an entirely new and innovative access route, for users to get time on ARCHER via a “Driving Test” The idea behind this was to help those who had never used ARCHER, or possibly any...
02 February 2021
Lorna Smith
As the ARCHER service was switched off, our colleagues at the ACF photographed and recorded ARCHER’s final moments. With a particular thank you to Connor, Aaron, Jordan, Craig and Paul at the ACF and to Spyro for putting this video together, we give you ARCHER’s final moment. It is best...
27 January 2021
Lorna Smith (EPCC)
At 8am this morning the ARCHER service was switched off. Funded by EPSRC and NERC, this sees the end of a remarkable service, a service that has acted as the UK’s National HPC Service for the last 7 years. Entering service at the end of 2013, just over 5.6 million...
16 December 2020
Andy Turner
We are currently in (or have recently finished, depending on when you read this) the Early Access period for the ARCHER2 service. During this period, users nominated by their peers and the ARCHER2 teams at EPCC and HPE Cray have had access to the ARCHER2 4-cabinet system. The Early User...
19 November 2020
Anne Whiting EPCC
With ARCHER2 part arrived and in early access, and with all the preparation to move from ARCHER to ARCHER2, with staff working remotely from home and all the other work ongoing, why on earth were we preparing for our annual ISO external audit and how could we make it work?...
27 October 2020
Julien Sindt EPCC
One of the upsides of working on the ARCHER2 CSE team is that, sometimes, one finds oneself in the interesting position of being the only user on the ARCHER2 four-cabinet system (at least the only apparent user – I’m sure that AdrianJ is lurking on one of the compute nodes...
29 July 2020
Clair Barrass
On the 14th July 2020 the first four cabinets of ARCHER2 arrived at the ACF and over the following few days they were unpacked, moved into position, connected up and ultimately powered up ready to go. Gregor Muir was on hand, capturing the whole process in still images and timelapse...
27 July 2020
Gregor Muir
A full week on from the 4 Cab Archer2 installation (affectionately dubbed Mini-Archer2, due to only having 18% of the full Shasta system’s 5848 compute nodes), and life is beginning to quiet down again for the temporary Summer Team at the ACF. This is now the second year that the...
17 July 2020
Lorna Smith
Final build day! The final day of the build of our 4 cabinet system. Yesterday saw the system booted and lots of testing carried out. First job of the day was to locate some erroneous cables that were causing power to not be read properly. Troubleshooting then identified the need...
16 July 2020
Lorna Smith
Day 4 and the vast majority of the work has been done, with the power commissioned and the management and storage systems configured and tested. As of last night, remote access was also enabled. As we near completion a number of our American colleagues have now left to return to...
15 July 2020
Lorna Smith
Day 3 and significant progress has been made. Yesterday saw the fitting of the cooling infrastructure between the mountain cabinets and the CDU. The site’s water supply has now been connected, bled and made live. All the power connections have been made and the CDU has been powered up as...
14 July 2020
Lorna Smith
Yesterday saw the first phase of ARCHER2 arrive on site, with all four Shasta Mountain cabinets moved in to their correct position. The images below show pictures of the back and the front of these cabinets. The red and blue cables are colour coded water pipes for the cooling system,...
13 July 2020
Lorna Smith
The first phase of ARCHER2 is in Edinburgh! The 4 cabinet Shasta Mountain system, the first phase of the 23 cabinet system, has completed its journey from Chippewa Falls in Wisconsin, making its way from Prestwick airport to Edinburgh this morning. The arrival of these large crates has, I admit,...
03 July 2020
Lorna Smith
Covid-19 has created significant challenges for the delivery of the new ARCHER2 system. It is therefore really exciting to see the first 4 cabinets of ARCHER2 leave Cray/HPE’s factory in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin to begin their journey to Edinburgh. ARCHER2 will replace the current ARCHER system, a Cray XC30, as...
19 June 2020
UKRI
UKRI are having weekly meetings with the ARCHER2 providers, EPCC and Cray/HPE. We are making good progress and are still on track to start installation of some compute capacity (a pilot system) in mid-July. We are also looking at further ARCHER extensions due to the COVID-19 delay. We now expect...
26 March 2020
EPCC
UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) has awarded contracts to run elements of the next national supercomputer, ARCHER2, which will represent a significant step forward in capability for the UK’s science community. EPCC has been awarded contracts to run the Service Provision (SP) and Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) services for...
13 March 2020
EPCC
We are pleased to welcome you to the new ARCHER2 website. Here you will find all the information about the service including updates on progress with the installation and setup of the new machine. Some sections of the site are still under development but we are actively working to ensure...
14 October 2019
UKRI
Details of the ARCHER2 hardware which will be provided by Cray (an HPE company). Following a procurement exercise, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) are pleased to announce that Cray have been awarded the contract to supply the hardware for the next national supercomputer, ARCHER2. ARCHER2 should be capable on average...