CoSTAR#

CoSTAR is the UK’s national research and development infrastructure for the creative industries. Driven by a wider national consortium, it brings together world-class facilities and digital technologies to support innovation across virtual production, immersive media, and AI-enabled content creation.

The CoSTAR HPC Cluster#

Operated and hosted by the University of Surrey on behalf of the national network, the CoSTAR High-Performance Computing (HPC) cluster provides the massive computational backbone required to fuel these next-generation creative technologies.

From training advanced AI models to rendering complex virtual environments, the cluster is purpose-built for heavy data processing and GPU-accelerated workloads. It empowers consortium researchers and partners with a scalable, reproducible environment using industry-standard tools like Slurm, Apptainer, and Open OnDemand.

Note

Access Information

The CoSTAR cluster is a dedicated national facility, separate from the University of Surrey’s primary computing infrastructure. Access is not granted or managed through the University’s standard access requests.

Hardware Specifications#

The CoSTAR cluster is a heterogeneous environment featuring 10 standard compute nodes, three pilot nodes, and 100 state-of-the-art NVIDIA H200 GPUs.

Compute Nodes#

Nodes

Processor

RAM

GPUs (per node)

10 × Standard Nodes

costar04 – costar13

2× AMD EPYC 9535

(128 cores total)

3 TB

8× H200 (141 GB HBM3e)

2 × Intel Pilot Nodes

costar01 – costar02

2× Intel Xeon 8480+

(112 cores total)

2 TB

8× H200 (141 GB HBM3e)

1 × AMD Pilot Node

costar03

2× AMD EPYC

(64 cores total)

1.1 TB

4× H200 (141 GB HBM3e)

Cluster Connectivity & Storage#

Login Node

costar-login01.surrey.ac.uk (Accessible only via VPN or SSH gateway)

Operating System

Rocky Linux 9.6

Interconnect Fabric

Mellanox InfiniBand NDR (400 Gb/s)

Parallel Storage

750 TB WekaFS (NVMe-backed)

Total Production Cores

1,568

Total Production GPUs

100× NVIDIA H200 (141 GB HBM3e)

Partners & Funding#

The University of Surrey is a core partner in the CoSTAR National Lab consortium. The cluster is supported and run in collaboration with:

  • Royal Holloway, University of London

  • Pinewood Studios

  • disguise

  • BT

  • Surrey County Council

  • Abertay University

  • National Film and Television School

Funding Acknowledgement:

CoSTAR is funded through UK Research and Innovation’s (UKRI) Infrastructure Fund and delivered by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

Learn More about the wider CoSTAR project#