Facilities

The Institute is operating virtually due to COVID-19. 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 2021.

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 provides approx. 5500 Intel CPU cores and 33TB RAM over more than 200 compute nodes
  • BEAR AI consists of ten IBM POWER9 compute nodes, each with dual 18-core POWER9 CPUs, 1TB RAM, and four NVIDIA Tesla V100, 16GB Tensor Core GPUs
  • CaStLeS (Compute and Storage for the Life Sciences) provides 22 compute nodes with 40 cores and 192GB RAM and 24 nodes with 20 cores and 128GB RAM for life science research
  • 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 provides 46 compute nodes each with two 32-core Intel CPUs, 512GB RAM, and four Nvidia A100-40 GPUs, 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.