Bath's high performance computing environments are available to all academic staff and doctoral students.

• Nimbus is scalable to meet both the smallest and largest computational needs
• Choose from a large diversity of processors optimised to meet specific research needs
• Tiered and cost effective storage solutions for short or long term data storage
  
• Choose a guaranteed Pay-As-You-Go compute service or a significantly cheaper Spot services which carries the risk of being terminated.
  
• Hosted in the Microsoft Azure cloud, Nimbus runs on regularly updated cutting-edge hardware.
  

User-friendly tools for easy access:

• Bespoke Research Computing Account Management Portal (requires a University VPN connection)
• Environment Modules for managing software and applications
  
• Slurm workload manager for easy job scheduling
  
• Azure CycleCloud for automated workload configuration and management
  
• Compute from anywhere with Open OnDemand (HTTPS). Create, save, submit, and monitor your jobs​ and to access graphical applications on compute nodes.

Access our online training material covering the Unix Shell, the Account Management Portal and Intro to HPC, the Nimbus cloud supercomputer and the Anatra HTC cluster.

Book your place on our next Intro to cloud HPC for new users training course.

There is a cost associated with using the Nimbus, so you will need funding to cover your computational costs.

Calculate your compute costs

Use the Research Computing Cost Estimator tool to calculate your compute costs.

Simply launch the tool, then select the compute instances you require and specify how many node hours you need.

Eviction charges

Spot compute VMs are available at a much lower cost than Pay as you go VMs. However, Spot VM workloads can be evicted (terminated) and your unsaved data will be lost.

Your Spot VM job is more likely to get evicted if you:

• Run your job on many nodes
  
• Run jobs for long durations
  

And Spot VMs are only ideal for workloads that:

• Use checkpointing software, so they can handle being evicted, and
  
• Have a lower risk of eviction
  

Research Computing will cover the cost of your evicted jobs up to 6 Node Hours.

If you run a job larger than 6 Node Hours on Spot VM and it is evicted, you will be charged for the cost incurred up until your job is evicted. This charging policy is in place to ensure we stay within the centrally allocated Research Computing budget.

Secure funding to run your workloads

You can receive high performance computing (HPC) funding from your department's Research Computing Champion, or a research project PI may grant you access to use their HPC budget.

Alternatively, you can apply for a University Research Computing Accelerator Award or external grant funding. Find out more.

RCAM Portal

Use the University's Research Computing Account Management (RCAM) Portal to administer your HPC budget, adjust budget allocations and monitor your spending.

You need a (University VPN connection) to access the portal.

Top up your HPC budget
Research grant holders and owners of Business World (Agresso) cost codes can request to have additional funds transferred into their 'HPC budget' category.

Not sure how to use RCAM?
Join our one-hour online training course for new users and experienced users that need help completing specific tasks in the portal.

The University's portfolio of research computing environments includes:

• The Anatra HTC cluster which is earmarked for software applications that can't run in the cloud, such as Gaussian and GaussView
  
• The GW4’s regional Isambard HPC service
  
• Bespoke cloud HPC teaching clusters