Isambard User Documentation

Isambard is a HPC service provided by GW4 and the UK Met Office. The system is funded by EPSRC and is one of a number of Tier-2 HPC facilities in the UK.

Isambard is a Cray XC50 system which comprises 20,992 cores, and is one of the world’s first production Arm-based supercomputers. While Isambard is not based on the more common x86 processors from Intel and AMD, most software compiles and runs on Isambard with no or minimal changes.

Each of the 329 compute nodes contain two 32-core Marvell ThunderX2 processors running at 2.5 GHz. 160 nodes have 256 GB and 169 have 512 GB of memory, both at DDR4-2666MHz. The nodes are connected via Cray Aries interconnect in a Dragonfly topology. A Cray Sonexion 3000 storage cabinet provides 900 terabytes of Lustre storage.

Service Status

Important

Since 23 July. 2023

Service issues.

The Servicedesk is currently experiencing issues so please be patient whilst we work with our email provider to fix this issue.

NOTE ON PHASE 3

Due to migration to newer storage old data can found read-only at /lustreOld e.g. previous home directory at /lustreOld/home

We have already copied over software from /lustreOld/software/x86 to the new /lustre location.

For any issues please contact isambard-support@gw4.ac.uk

System Status

Important

26 June. 2023

  • Login: Available.

  • XCI (ARM ThunderX2): Available.

  • MACS: Available.

  • A64fx: Available.

  • Phase 3: Available.

Acknowledging Isambard

Research outputs that have made use of Isambard should acknowledge the facility by using the following phrase:

This work used the Isambard 2 UK National Tier-2 HPC Service (http://gw4.ac.uk/isambard/) operated by GW4 and the UK Met Office, and funded by EPSRC (EP/T022078/1)

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