Nimbus cloud supercomputer

Working specifications: Compute, networking, software and storage info for Nimbus, the University's new cloud HPC environment.

Rows of large supercomputers in a server room — Research Computing supports computationally and data intensive research at the University.

Build and migration update

22 June 2022: Over the past month, we have had to reprioritise the project due to staffing and contractor shortages.

The Nimbus development and system testing is now scheduled to be completed by the end of July, which is later than our original timelines.

Once Nimbus is fully built, we will start the phased migration of users onto the new cloud environment. This is scheduled to start in August. Find out more.

Join Research Computing's mailing list to keep up-to-date with Bath's move to cloud supercomputing.

Working specifications

Hardware

Nimbus is hosted on the powerful and highly scalable Microsoft Azure platform, which offers virtually unlimited on-demand HPC computing and storage to meet your specific research needs.

The cloud environment includes the Azure CycleCloud tool, which give you a simple way to configure 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)

Using Nimbus for your research

Nimbus is under development and will gradually be made available to staff and doctoral researchers at the University.

Join Research Computing's mailing list to keep up-to-date with Bath's move to cloud supercomputing, compute and data storage costs, training opportunities and research computing events.

Use of our cloud development environment
The Janus development environment, is available to new doctoral researchers at the University.

Request a Janus project account if you are a new PhD student and would like to use Janus for your research.

Nimbus is the largest of Bath's portfolio of research computing environments, which also includes:

The on-site Anatra HTC cluster, and
The GW4 Isambard HPC service

Acknowledging Research Computing

Research Computing provides state-of-the-art high performance computing and research software engineering support to the academic community, significantly impacting the quality of the resultant research output.

Find out how to acknowledge us in your publications.