High Performance Computing

Computing Services currently supports a parallel computing (Beowulf) cluster with a variety of hardware and software configurations. If you are unsure if any of these features are suited to your particular need then please contact the Advanced Research Computing team for advice.

Registration is required to use HPC facilities.

Overview of HPC facilities

As of 2020, the main HPC resource on campus at The University of Liverpool is a parallel Linux cluster called Barkla. 

This is Barkla by numbers:
• 136 nodes, each with 40 cores and 384GB of memory
• Two nodes have 1.1TB of memory
• Three nodes have four GPUs each
• 68 nodes are for general use
• 68 nodes belong to various research groups for dedicated access
• All nodes are connected by a 100 gbit/s OmniPath network
• 200TB networked storage for ordinary computations
• 360TB parallel file storage for computations with large amounts of I/O

In addition, University of Liverpool researchers may be able to apply for time on the national ARCHER service as well as on one of the EPSRC Tier-2 systems.

EPSRC Tier-2 system information

EPSRC Tier-2 access information

Installing HPC software

Genuine requests for HPC software to be installed are viewed sympathetically, particularly if the software is free. However, Computing Services cannot provide any guarantee that full support will be available for all software installations. If you wish to arrange for HPC software to be installed, please contact the Advanced Research Computing team in the first instance.