What services are available?

The High Performance Computing services, ALICE and SPECTRE, here at Leicester offer computational resources well beyond that available on desktop PCs. ALICE, one of the most powerful systems in a UK University, provides researchers across the University with a vital resource for modelling and simulations, data processing and analysis. SPECTRE provides an interactive Linux environment for both academics and students combined with a smaller HPC cluster. These systems are available from both on and off-site.

Who will use these services?

Anyone who has a requirement for either a Linux environment or processing power beyond that available on a desktop PC is a potential user of these services.

Undergraduates

For Undergraduates this means using SPECTRE which provides the more interactive environment that students need. Mostly, students use of SPECTRE will be supported by their department.

Researchers

For Researchers this means using either SPECTRE, with its superior capacity for interactive work, or ALICE which provides the maximum processing power for batch jobs. Many researchers may use both systems with SPECTRE providing a development environment for ALICE and interactive capability for pre/post processing of data. If you're unsure which service to use, or whether either of them will be useful to you, contact the IT Service Desk and the Research Computing Services team can help determine which service is most appropriate and provide training in using it.

What's the difference between the services?

ALICE

The largest of the HPC systems is  optimised for providing maximum performance for the most demanding data processing, data analysis and simulation tasks. Processes on this system are runs as batch jobs with, typically, one large process running for  many hours or days or many short processes running simultaneously. ALICE is only available to researchers.

SPECTRE

The smaller service is configured to allow a significant amount of interactive use without needing to submit jobs to a scheduler whilst still having a batch processing capability, although at lower performance than ALICE. SPECTRE is available to all academic staff and students at the University.

Getting an Account

Access to SPECTRE is available to all staff and students simply by contacting the IT Service Desk on x2253. For further information see the SPECTRE Getting an Account page

Access to ALICE is available only to research postgraduates and staff. All users must be associated with an ALICE research project which must be applied for in advance. There are further details in the ALICE  Getting and Account section.

Getting Support

All support requests should be sent to the IT Service Desk using the contact details at the top right of this page.

Further Information

Within this section of the website you'll find information about how to access the services, the user environment and the software available. Most of this information is the same for both services as their configuration is very similar.