Facilities

An exciting dedicated physical space is being configured for the Institute which will co-locate a range of our activities and provide collaborative working space for researchers from across the campus. We look forward to welcoming collaborators and visitors in Autumn 2023.

Server room equipment

Computing Infrastructure

Our researchers benefit from access to outstanding high performance computing facilities provided by the Birmingham Environment for Academic Research (BEAR). These include:

  • BlueBEAR is a heterogeneous cluster, featuring a total of 20000 cores, 40 GPUs and 128TiB RAM, connected with 100Gb/s EDR and 200Gb/s HDR InfiniBand, with further expansion imminent
  • Research Data Store, a multi-petabyte central enterprise-grade storage service for research data.

We are also partners in two national Tier-2 facilities funded by EPSRC as part of the World Class Labs funding scheme:

  • Baskerville, hosted by the University of Birmingham and recently expanded, now consists of - 54 nodes, with 3888 cores, 208 Nvidia A100 GPUs, 2 special accelerator devices and a total of 27TiB RAM, all connected with 200Gb/s HDR InfiniBand as well as the original ‘plus 500TB solid state disk, and 5PB of spinning disk storage.
  • Sulis consists of 25,216 AMD EPYC compute cores configured as 167 dual processor CPU compute nodes plus 30 nodes equipped with three Nvidia A100 40GB GPUs.

A proportion of each of these systems is reserved for use by University of Birmingham researchers.

In addition to these central facilities, the Institute hosts three high performance workstations for visualisation work. Each of these has a 64-core AMD Threadripper CPU, 256GB RAM, and dual Nvidia Quadro P6000 24GB graphics cards for high performance rendering.

Training

The Advanced Researching Computing team offer a range of training courses on high performance computing, including the internationally used Carpentries courses that aim to "teach foundational coding, and data science skills to researchers worldwide". Training courses are available at no cost to Birmingham researchers.