Build and migration update

August 2022 update

Fully integrated cost control
After a year of progressive development work, we are excited to announce that the Nimbus build project is now in its final phase.

Over the past month, we have integrated the University's finance system with Nimbus' job scheduler. This provides the tools and controls for you to manage your costs in the cloud through the new Research Computing Account management Portal (RCA Portal).

Thorough system tests underway
We are now running a series of system and user acceptance tests on the cost control process and on the full Nimbus environment, and will be fixing any issues this uncovers. The work is scheduled to be completed by early September.

We will email all Janus and Balena users when we have a firm migration start date. To accommodate busy work schedules, we will offer all users a choice of several onboarding sessions. 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

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.

Funding your computational research

Before you start using Nimbus, you will need to secure funding to cover the cost of your computational research.

Extensive use of computational resources should be covered by external grants.

Medium and smaller size research projects will typically be funded by your department's research computing budget. If your department can't cover the cost of your research, you can apply for a University Research Computing Accelerator Award.

Find out how to apply for funding to cover your supercomputing costs.

Bath's portfolio of research computing environments

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

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.