The Iridis Compute Cluster

Iridis is one of the largest computational facilities in the UK. Funded by the second round of the Science Research Investment Fund and purchased from OCF Plc. Iridis is what is commonly known as a Beowulf cluster. The current Iridis 2 is our second generation cluster, and is now based on AMD Opteron processors, running RedHat Enterprise Linux.

Iridis provides High Perfomance Computing facilities in a professionally managed service environment and is available to the University's entire research community.

Access to Iridis

Iridis is primarily designed as a batch service for users who need to run either distributed memory parallel jobs, or multiple resource-intensive sequential jobs in order to explore some parameter space. If you are a researcher or postgraduate student and think that you have a good case for using Iridis, please fill in the online application form. You will feel most at home on Iridis if you are already used to working in a Linux/Unix environment. However, we are endeavouring to make it more accessible to users who are more familiar with Windows, particularly those from Schools who have traditionally not been heavy users of High Performance Computing. We regret that we do not have the resources to be able to grant access to undergraduates or MSc students

Iridis contains:

  • Over 1000 processor-cores; consisting of around 600 single-core processors and around 480 dual-core processors
  • Myrinet high-speed interconnect on 64 dual-processor nodes
  • Over 900 GB of memory
  • Over 30 TB of local disk storage
  • ~ 7TB of filestore on RAID5 disk array