Isambard is a HPC service provided by GW4 and the UK Met Office. The system is funded by EPSRC and is one of a number of Tier-2 HPC facilities in the UK.
Warning
The Isambard 2 service was retired on 30th September 2024 and these pages are also retired.
Isambard 3 information available at Bristol Centre for Supercomputing Documentation
Isambard is a Cray XC50 system which comprises 20,992 cores, and is one of the world's first production Arm-based supercomputers. While Isambard is not based on the more common x86 processors from Intel and AMD, most software compiles and runs on Isambard with no or minimal changes.
Each of the 329 compute nodes contain two 32-core Marvell ThunderX2 processors running at 2.5 GHz. 160 nodes have 256 GB and 169 have 512 GB of memory, both at DDR4-2666MHz. The nodes are connected via Cray Aries interconnect in a Dragonfly topology. A Cray Sonexion 3000 storage cabinet provides 900 terabytes of Lustre storage.
Warning
Since 18 Aug. 2024
No known issues.
Important
The Isambard 2 service will shutdown at 9am on Monday 30th September 2024 and be replaced with an entirely new Isambard 3 service. Data management is the responsibility of the user therefore we require all important data moved off Isambard 2 before it is shutdown. Support will only be provided for operational issues until the shutdown. Further information will be provided on Isambard 3 in September.
On Tuesday June 4th 2024 at 9am the "PHASE 3" was switched OFF and was moved to Bristol to be part of Isambard 3.
Important
29 Jul. 2024
- Login bastion: Available.
- XCI (ARM ThunderX2): Available.
- MACS: Available.
- A64fx: Available.
- Phase 3: Switched off - see announcement above.
An anouncement mailing list is availale to be kept informed of important news regarding the service. Archives and managing your subscription is available at JiscMail GW4-ISAMBARD-COMMUNITY
Research outputs that have made use of Isambard should acknowledge the facility by using the following phrase:
This work used the Isambard 2 UK National Tier-2 HPC Service (http://gw4.ac.uk/isambard/) operated by GW4 and the UK Met Office, and funded by EPSRC (EP/T022078/1)
.. toctree:: :maxdepth: 2 :caption: Isambard User Guide user-guide/requestaccount.rst user-guide/connecting.rst user-guide/filesystem.rst user-guide/jobs.rst user-guide/MACS.rst user-guide/XCI.rst user-guide/A64FX.rst user-guide/PHASE3.rst user-guide/software.md user-guide/spack.md user-guide/debugging.rst user-guide/end_project.rst user-guide/support.rst user-guide/gpus.rst
.. toctree:: :maxdepth: 2 :caption: Development Tools tools/ddt tools/gdb4hpc
.. toctree:: :maxdepth: 1 :caption: Applications applications/arepo applications/covidsim applications/dune applications/dedalus applications/dlmonte applications/firedrake applications/gromacs applications/openfoam applications/orca applications/vasp
.. toctree:: :maxdepth: 1 :caption: Service Policies policies/terms.rst policies/privacy.rst policies/applications.rst