Cambridge High Performance Computing Service
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| Cambridge High Performance Computing Service | |
|---|---|
| Name | Cambridge High Performance Computing Service |
| Formation | 2000s |
| Type | University computing service |
| Location | Cambridge, England |
| Leader title | Director |
| Parent organization | University of Cambridge |
Cambridge High Performance Computing Service
The Cambridge High Performance Computing Service is a university-affiliated computing facility providing centralized computational resources to researchers across the University of Cambridge, affiliated colleges, and collaborating institutions. It supports interdisciplinary projects in fields ranging from Physics-linked laboratories such as Cavendish Laboratory to biological research at Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, and enables partnerships with external organizations including European Research Council-funded consortia, UK Research and Innovation, and industry partners like ARM Holdings and Centre for Process Innovation. The service integrates hardware procurement, software provisioning, user support, and policy oversight to deliver scalable computing for grant-funded work involving large-scale simulation, data analysis, and machine learning.
History
The service traces origins to departmental clusters in the Department of Engineering and the Department of Computer Science and Technology in the late 1990s, formalizing during expansion driven by projects linked to Large Hadron Collider collaborations and Human Genome Project successor studies. Early milestones include adoption of clustered computing influenced by architectures used at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, procurement cycles coordinated with initiatives such as the Higher Education Funding Council for England and collaborations with commercial vendors including Cray Research and IBM. Over successive funding rounds involving Wellcome Trust grants, the service grew to support cross-collegiate research programs tied to institutes like the Institute of Astronomy, the Sainsbury Laboratory, and the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research. It has evolved through policy developments influenced by Research Councils UK frameworks and compliance standards set by European Commission research infrastructures.
Services and Infrastructure
The service offers batch scheduling, interactive nodes, high-throughput computing and bespoke virtualized environments supporting projects from Department of Chemistry computational chemistry groups to Faculty of Law empirical studies using natural language processing. Core offerings include secure login, job scheduling compatible with SLURM Workload Manager and PBS (software), data staging integrated with European Grid Infrastructure principles, and container support via Docker and Singularity (software). Storage and networking are provisioned with technologies inspired by deployments at EMBL-EBI and linked to campus networks compatible with JANET (UK) and Gigabit Ethernet backbones. Collaboration services include identity federation interoperable with Shibboleth and project accounting aligned to standards from UK Research and Innovation and funders like the Wellcome Trust.
Hardware and Software Architecture
Hardware architecture emphasizes heterogeneous compute featuring multi-core CPUs from vendors such as Intel and AMD, GPU accelerators from NVIDIA for deep learning and visualization tasks used by groups studying models in Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, and specialized FPGA resources paralleling deployments at Imperial College London. High-performance storage leverages parallel file systems influenced by Lustre (file system) and object stores echoing Amazon S3 design patterns for research data management. Software stacks include scientific libraries such as OpenMPI, BLAS implementations, domain-specific packages like Gaussian (software) for computational chemistry and GROMACS for molecular dynamics, and machine learning frameworks including TensorFlow and PyTorch. Monitoring and orchestration make use of tools comparable to Prometheus (software) and Kubernetes, while security controls adhere to practices championed by National Cyber Security Centre (UK).
Research and Academic Applications
Research applications span astronomy simulations supporting projects at Institute of Astronomy and collaborations with European Southern Observatory, bioinformatics pipelines for groups at Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and European Bioinformatics Institute, climate modeling in partnership with Met Office researchers, and computational fluid dynamics studies linked to Rolls-Royce and Siemens collaborations. Academic curricula integrate the service into coursework offered by the Department of Computer Science and Technology, the Department of Physics, and the Department of Engineering, enabling students on programmes such as the MPhil in Advanced Computer Science and doctoral projects funded by EPSRC and Gates Cambridge Scholarship recipients to access production-scale resources. Cross-disciplinary research hubs like the Cambridge Centre for Data-Driven Discovery utilize the service for reproducible workflows and publication pipelines targeting journals like Nature and Science.
Governance and Funding
Governance is administered through committees composed of representatives from the University of Cambridge faculties, college IT directors, and research leaders from entities such as the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and the Medical Research Council. Funding combines central university capital allocations, grant-funded infrastructure from agencies including UK Research and Innovation and European Research Council, and contributions from strategic partners like Cisco Systems and cloud providers mirroring agreements with Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud. Policy oversight covers data governance in line with regulations influenced by the UK Data Protection Act and interoperability expectations of the European Open Science Cloud while complying with procurement frameworks used by public research institutions.
User Support and Training
User support includes a helpdesk, consultancy for grant applications interfacing with funders such as Wellcome Trust and Royal Society, and training workshops co-delivered with the Software Sustainability Institute and the Alan Turing Institute. Courses address parallel programming techniques using MPI and OpenMP, GPU programming with CUDA, reproducible research practices taught alongside the Cambridge Digital Humanities initiative, and data stewardship aligned with FAIR data principles promoted by the European Commission. Peer-led communities, hackathons hosted with groups like Cambridge University Technology and Enterprise Club and collaborative projects with HPC Wales and other UK consortia, extend capability-building to researchers and postgraduate students.