In Semester 2, 2022, the University will get a powerful new cloud supercomputer which will replace the old Balena HPC cluster.
The temporary development environment, named Janus, is currently used by over 40 early access users.
Hardware specifications
The University's cloud HPC environment is hosted on the highly scalable Microsoft Azure platform which offers virtually unlimited on-demand HPC computing and storage to help accelerate your scientific discovery.
Our cloud environment includes the Azure CycleCloud tool which give you a simple way to configure your workloads. It also lets you optimise and scale the HPC infrastructure to meet your evolving research needs. CycleCloud includes the open source Slurm workload manager.
Storage
- 2 TB Home storage area allowing users to log in
- 16 TB Campaign area used for storing data. 512 MiB/s bandwidth
- 9 TB Scratch space for temporary compute storage. 576.00 MiB/s.
- BUCS Home, i.e., the H Drive
Compute
- HBv2-series, HBv3-series, HB-series offering from 16 to 120 AMD CPUs and HC-series offering 44 INTEL CPUs per node
- Fsv2-series offering from 2 to 72 CPUs per node
- NCv3-series, NDv2-series offering from 1 to 8 NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs per node
Network fabrics
- Mellanox EDR InfiniBand (100 Gb/sec or 200 Gb/s depending on the series)
- VPN from Bath to Azure (Bandwidth: 1 Gb/s)
Software environment
- Azure CycleCloud for automated configuration and management of the HPC environment
- Slurm for cluster job scheduling
- Modules environment for managing software and applications
- Connect via Secure Shell (SSH) the cluster
Using Janus for your research
Our cloud environment is under development and will gradually be made available to academic staff and doctoral researchers at the University.
Janus project request for doctoral researchers
Janus is now available to new doctoral researchers at the University. Request a project account if you would like to use the HPC environment for your research.
Janus is the largest of Bath's new three pillar research computing infrastructure. Bath researchers and students can also use:
- The on-site Anatra HTC cluster, and
- The GW4 Isambard HPC service