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ARCHER2 Weekly Newsletter

By ARCHER2 Service on October 15, 2025

Tags: newsletters 

UKRI National Compute Resources (NCRs): Phase One

This opportunity is seeking potential hosting entities for the first phase of UKRI investment in NCRs. Currently it is anticipated that up to £9.5 million will be available per NCR and at least two NCRs will be supported in this round. Further funds (up to £2 million p.a.) will be provided for each NCR from 2026-2031 to cover NCR service provision, power and other directly relevant costs necessary for user support. These services will support research across the whole UKRI remit.

This opportunity is open to potential host site providers and their support teams (‘hosting entities’ – hosting entities may be a single site or a partnership co-localised across sites) who have the experience and access to the necessary infrastructure (either through direct ownership or through suitable commercial arrangements) to host an NCR, can deliver the hardware components by March 2026 and can operate a full service for users commencing in the 2026/2027 financial year. The requirements for hosting entities are provided below.

It is expected that the 2025/2026 UKRI investment in NCRs will fund:

  • At least one CPU-based system and;
  • At least one heterogeneous or accelerated system.

There is also an Expression of Interest (EoI) for future (Phase 2) phased investment in Financial Year 2026/2027, which will go live shortly. Applicants for the phase 1 NCR call are welcome to submit EoIs for phase 2. A second NCR hosting opportunity is expected to launch in early 2026.

Autumn 2025 UKRI Access to HPC Call open

Deadline: 6 November 2025 4:00pm UK time

ARCHER2 access page

Full details of UKRI call

ARCHER2 Celebration of Science 2026

We are pleased to announce that ARCHER2 Celebration of Science 2026 will take place on the 19th - 20th March 2026 in Edinburgh at South Hall, The University of Edinburgh.

Please register here to participate. The event is in-person and there is no registration fee.

What to expect at ARCHER2 Celebration of Science

ARCHER2 Celebration of Science is annual event that brings together the ARCHER2 user community to celebrate their scientific achievements on ARCHER2. You can explore the highlights of previous events here and view the science showcased in the previous years.

The two-day programme of ARCHER2 Celebration of Science 2026 will include:

  • Invited talks: a variety of talks from the invited speakers highlighting their impactful research using ARCHER2.

  • Poster programme: a platform for the ARCHER2 community to present and discuss their successes delivered on ARCHER2 through the lightning talks and the poster session. A Best Poster Prize will be awarded. - Call for Posters is now open!

  • Keynote: the keynote will be given by Professor Mark Parsons, Director of EPCC.

  • Panel Session: focuses on key topics for the ARCHER2 and UK research community.

  • ARCHER2 User Forum: learn about the latest service updates and engage directly with the ARCHER2 team.

  • Diversity Session: an interactive session to discuss the equality, diversity and inclusion challenges related to the delivery of HPC services.

Registration, and Call for posters are open now. Full details here

Green software use on HPC

Birmingham, 22 October 2025 10:00 - 15:30 BST

This lesson introduces environmental sustainability principles in the context of high performance computing (HPC) systems. Understanding the scale of emissions from different sources is critical to being able to make changes to work in a more environmentally sustainable way. This lesson will give you the ability to understand emissions arising from use of HPC system and how to quantify them. We will use practical examples and real data from an existing HPC facility to illustrate the concepts. By the end of this lesson you should:

  • Be able to understand the concept of carbon efficiency and how it relates to energy efficiency including cases where energy efficiency can be at odds with carbon efficiency
  • Know about how HPC systems potentially reduce emissions
  • Understand carbon intensity of electricity generation and the implications for carbon aware use of HPC
  • Appreciate the embodied emissions associated with HPC hardware and how they impact carbon aware use of HPC
  • Be aware of the frameworks used to measure and report on carbon emissions and how the terms used in these frameworks map onto HPC
  • Gain practical advice on how you can measure and improve the carbon efficiency of your use of HPC

We use the UK National Supercomputing Service, ARCHER2 as an example throughout this lesson but the principles and learning should be applicable to any HPC system. Target Audience:

This lesson is aimed at all stakeholders in HPC use (e.g. researchers, RSEs, funders). No knowledge of environmental sustainability principles is assumed.

Full details and registration

Single Node Performance Optimisation

Online, 21 - 22 October 2025 09:30 - 17:30 Day 1, 09:30 - 16.30 Day 2

This course covers techniques for improving the performance of parallel applications by optimising of the code that runs within each node.

Modern HPC systems such as ARCHER2 are being constructed using increasingly powerful nodes, with larger and larger numbers of cores and enhanced vector capabilities. To extract maximum performance from applications, it is therefore necessary to understand, and be able to overcome, on-node performance bottlenecks. This course will cover the main features of modern HPC nodes, including multiple cores, vector floating point units, deep cache hierarchies, and NUMA memory systems. We will cover techniques for efficient programming of these features, using batch processing options and compiler options as well as hand tuning of code. The course will also contain an introduction to the use of Cray performance analysis tools.

Full details and registration

NetDRIVE Second Call for Community Projects and Champions

The NetDRIVE 2nd call for community projects has been published, offering over £1m for activities contributing towards sustainable research computing for UKRI:

  • Guidance and application forms
  • The total budget for community projects will be £1m (100% FEC, with projects being awarded 80% FEC).
  • The 2nd call will have two components: around 20% of funds will be reserved for projects led by early career applicants (submissions of full proposals close October 24th , but applications to join a sandpit event should be submitted by September 10th) and the remainder will be open to all (submissions close October 10th).
  • There is also funding in this call for 3 champions with social science qualifications, with two of these positions reserved for early career applicants.

Understanding the dRTP Training Landscape Workshop

The Understanding the dRTP Training Landscape Workshop will take place on 5th - 6th November 2025 at Bidborough House, UCL, London.

  • Event: Understanding the dRTP Training Landscape Workshop
  • Date: 5th - 6th November 2025
  • Location: Bidborough House, 38–50 Bidborough Street, London, WC1H 9BT
  • Registration form link:
  • Registration deadline: 5pm on Thursday 23 October 2025

This event, funded by the UKRI dRTP Skills NetworkPlus Programme, aims to

  • Identify existing dRTP roles,
  • Identify existing training courses and resources,
  • Link those roles to specific skills / competencies,
  • Align those skills / competencies with the existing training materials.

The workshop will also identify gaps in provision and areas where new or adapted content is needed, and where teams are working on similar materials and could fruitfully collaborate. Those efforts are another step towards making professional skill development easier and improving career prospects across the whole dRTP ecosystem. The workshop outcomes will be shared with the dRTP community.

We are hoping to better outline and understand the whole dRTP ecosystem, therefore, we would like to extend an invitation to dRTPs working in different roles and at different institution types, and engaging with a wide range of research communities.

There will be plenty of opportunities for discussion during the interactive sessions and we look forward to seeing many of you at the event. Please complete the registration form to join. There is no registration fee for the event. The detailed agenda will be circulated close to the event date.

We would be happy to provide support for a few participants whose organisation/projects cannot cover travel costs. If you would like to attend the event but need any travel support, please apply for the travel support by answering the relevant questions in the registration form.

If there are any questions for the registration, please contact the event organiser.

This event is co-organised by the following NetworkPlus projects:

This event is not organised by the ARCHER2 team but may be of interest to members of the ARCHER2 user community.

ARCHER2 Publication Database

The ARCHER2 service maintains a publication database of works that have arisen from ARCHER2 and links them to project IDs that have ARCHER2 access. We ask all users of ARCHER2 to register any publications in the database - all you need is your publication’s DOI.

Registering your publications in SAFE has a number of advantages:

  • For large projects in particular, it allows the project lead to collect publications from all the project members to assist with ResearchFish submissions
  • Your publication automatically gets added to the ARCHER2 publications page
  • Your publication is included in reports to UKRI
  • The better the record we have of publications arising from the ARCHER2 service, the easier it is to demonstrate the impacts and benefits of the service; allowing UKRI to secure funding for future national supercomputing services.

Further details and instructions on how to add publications

Monitoring jobs

We provide advice on how to monitor running jobs

In particular, we would remind users that the watch command can cause heavy load on the slurm system, impacting all users of ARCHER2. If it is essential to poll slurm in this way, please ensure that you set a time period of 60 seconds or longer.

Recently added known issues

The “Known Issues” page of the ARCHER2 Documentation https://docs.archer2.ac.uk/known-issues/ lists all current open known issues including a description of the issue, its symptoms and any work-arounds.

Following the ACF outage, most services have been returned to service successfully, however the ARCHER2 GPU nodes are still unavailable

Upcoming ARCHER2 Training

Further details of upcoming training

We always welcome researchers wishing to present their work in a webinar - please contact the Service Desk if you would be interested in presenting your work.

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Recordings of past courses

Recordings of past virtual tutorials