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Research Computing Services

On 30th March 2017 the University of Cambridge Research Computing Service, in partnership with EPSRC and STFC, announced a co-investment of £14M for the creation of the Cambridge Service for Data Driven Discovery (CSD3). The EPSRC element of the service is a consortium led by the University of Cambridge in partnership with the Universities of Bristol, Leicester, Southampton and Oxford, Kings College London, UCL and Imperial College.

Peta 4 is the flagship CPU supercomputer for RCS. It is currently comprised of 1468 nodes of traditional CPU. 


System Features

  • Nationally available infrastructure via EPSRC, STFC-DiRAC, STFC-IRIS and Industry.
  • Connects to the 5PB/s LustreFS shared with Wilkes3  (from the Research Data Store service).
  • The composition of Peta 4 has changed since the original installation in 2017 as new hardware has been added and older hardware retired. The current makeup of Peta 4 is described below.

Installed November 2018: 384 Skylake nodes

  • 2 x Intel Xeon Skylake 6142 processors, 2.6GHz 16-core
  • 192GiB RAM (high memory nodes have 384GiB RAM)
  • Intel OPA 100Gbs

Upgrade September 2020: 672 Cascade Lake nodes

  • 2x Intel Xeon Platinum 8276 CPU @ 2.20GHz 28-core
  • 192GiB RAM (high memory nodes have 384GiB RAM)
  • Mellanox HDR100 InfiniBand

Upgrade November 2021: 544 Ice Lake nodes

  • 2x Intel Xeon Platinum 8368Q CPU @ 2.60GHz 38-core
  • 256GiB RAM (high memory nodes have 512GiB RAM)
  • Mellanox HDR200 InfiniBand