The University of Southampton views High Performance Computing as a strategic enabler to its research mission and, over many years, has made significant investments in this area. Iridis, the University's High Performance Computing System, has dramatically increased the computational performance and reach over its predecessor.
Iridis is currently in its fifth generation and remains one of the largest computational facilities in the UK. In November 2017, Iridis 5 joined the elite of the world’s top 500 supercomputers and is over four times more powerful than its predecessor. Iridis 5 also includes the new Data Intensive service, 20 of Nvidia’s enterprise GPUs, and a dedicated data visualisation service.
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. If you are a researcher or postgraduate student and think that you have a good case for using Iridis, please complete in the online application form.
Undergraduate and MSc students can access the Lyceum service which runs on the Iridis cluster. Project/Course tutors should fill out the Lyceum Account Application Form to request access for students.
The main source of information on the Iridis 5 and Lyceum services is the HPC Community Wiki. This is accessible in SharePoint to registered users. As well as documentation on how to access and use the services, there are details on training courses, background information on the facilities and links to sources of further information.
There is also an HPC Community Team in MS Teams. This provides registered users with access to technical support channels and a system status channel. This reports the current status of the systems, scheduled maintenance and any ongoing problems/accidents.
The links to the Wiki and MS Teams HPC Community Team are given below.
When preparing a publication describing work that involved usage of Iridis, please ensure that you reference the Iridis cluster. Such recognition is important for acquiring funding for the next generation hardware, support services, data storage and infrastructure. The following text is suggested as a starting point. Please, feel free to augment or modify as you see fit.
''The authors acknowledge the use of the IRIDIS High Performance Computing Facility, and associated support services at the University of Southampton, in the completion of this work.''
In addition, we kindly ask you to notify us of any report, conference papers, journal article, theses which contain results which were obtained on Iridis by sending an email to hpc@soton.ac.uk
Further information can be found using the following links. Please note these are only available from within the University of Southampton LAN and you will be asked to log in.