March11#

The March11 High-Performance Computing (HPC) cluster is a dedicated computing facility supporting the Thermo-Fluid Systems University Technology Centre (UTC) at the University of Surrey.

Supported by Rolls-Royce plc since 2003, the UTC focuses on turbomachinery fluid and thermal systems. The March11 cluster drives the high-precision simulations of gas turbine engine flows needed to optimise efficiency and mechanical design.

Note

Access Information

March11 is a private, industry-funded cluster. Access is restricted to researchers working directly within the Thermo-Fluid Systems UTC and its formal collaborative partners.

Hardware Specifications#

The March11 cluster provides a high-density x86_64 architecture running on the Rocky Linux 8 operating system, optimised for massive MPI-based fluid dynamics and simulation pipelines.

Compute Nodes#

Nodes

Processor

RAM

GPUs (per node)

26 × Standard Nodes

node01 – node26

2× AMD EPYC 7543

(64 cores total)

512 GB

None

2 × GPU Nodes

gpu-node01 – gpu-node02

2× AMD EPYC

(64 cores total)

512 GB

1× NVIDIA A30 (24 GB)

Cluster Connectivity & Storage#

Login Node

Internal access only

Operating System

Rocky Linux 8.10

Interconnect Fabric

Mellanox InfiniBand ConnectX-6 (100 Gb/s)

Total Production Cores

1,792

Total Production GPUs

2× NVIDIA A30 (24 GB HBM2e)

Cluster Software & Homes

  • /users (~1.9 TB NFSv4 from Headnode)

  • /opt/software (~1.0 TB Central Applications)

UTC Project & User Data

  • ~60 TB total capacity provisioned via an external storage array

Partners & Funding#

The cluster and its associated research environments are funded and sustained through long-term industrial collaboration and research grants, primarily featuring:

  • Rolls-Royce plc

  • UK National Funding Agencies (UKRI)

  • European Commission Turbomachinery Collaborations

Research is closely aligned with campus experimental spaces, including the Environmental Flow Laboratory (EnFlo) and the Surrey Advanced Vehicle Analysis Group (SAVAG).