Important

When seeking out support please bear in mind that the Research Computing team operate from 9am to 5pm Monday through Friday, except for holidays.

Research Computing Community on Microsoft Teams¶

A great way to get support is from your peers and colleagues here at Surrey. There is an open community on Microsoft Teams where you will find plenty of knowledgeable and experienced HPC users already discussing all things HPC.

This is also a great way to speak directly to the IT Services Research Computing team and get updates on scheduled maintenance and system outages.

Get involved…

Join our Research Computing Community on Microsoft Teams

Research Computing Virtual Appointments¶

You can book a one-on-one session with us through the Research Computing Booking System:

RSE (Research Software Engineering) appointment - for support with writing, developing, or optimising research code, tools, and workflows.

Requesting New Software¶

If you have a request for a new software package to be installed on one of the HPC clusters, please Support Ticket as above and provide the following information:

Name of the software
Summary/background information about software - what you want to use it for.
Which cluster you would like the software installed on.
A link to the website to download the software.
Version number of the software required.
What type of version/additional libraries or specific compilation options you require.

Note

Please be prepared to test the software for us once installed to ensure it has been compiled properly.

Research Software Engineering Support¶

At the moment two research software engineers (RSEs), who are part of the Surrey Research Compute (SRC) initiative, are available for collaborations with researchers across the university.

The RSE group offers a variety of services and support including:

Troubleshooting and Consultation¶

We can assist in diagnosing and solving code issues, whether through Support Ticket, messages on MS Teams , or in person via our drop-in sessions.

Additionally, we can consult on projects, whether they are on-going or in the planning phase and can provide input on

Software design
Data visualization
Code repository reviews
Technical aspects of grant writing

Training¶

The group supports Surrey’s research community by offering training in different areas, including software engineering skills and best practises. For available courses, see our dedicated SharePoint page.

Project Work¶

The RSEs bring advanced software engineering expertise to Surrey’s research community, for example by:

Developing, expanding, and refactoring research software across various disciplines.
Examining and enhancing the performance of current research software.
Updating older software systems.
Transferring current software to HPC environments.
Accelerating existing software through parallelisation or the use of GPUs.

If you require support from a research software engineer for your project, you can now apply for RSE support on the SRC website.

Purchasing HPC Servers¶

Eureka2 HPC cluster¶

Any member of staff is eligible to buy into the Eureka2 HPC cluster. Contributing resources to a cluster will increase your SLURM fairshare on the cluster.

See: Job priority and “Fairshare” for more information on how fairshare works.

Below outlines the specification for a standard Eureka2 HPC compute node:

Node: Dell PowerEdge R6525
CPU: AMD EPYC 7452 32-Core Processor, 3.4GHz
CPUs per node: 2
CPU cores per node: 64
GPUs per node: 0
RAM per node: 512GB
High-performance Interconnect (Speed): Infiniband (100Gb/s)

If you have any further questions relating to buying a similar node but perhaps with slightly higher specification (eg. a higher memory node), buying other kind of HPC hardware, or you require a quotation with details and costs, please raise a support ticket. See the Equipment Purchase template on the Ticket Templates page