The ALICE HPC service launched on July 20 2010.

The service

ALICE is a High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster, purchased through a £2million CIF award. It is a research facility and is available to all academic staff, postdoctoral researchers and postgraduate research students.

The service is hosted by IT Services with a researcher led management group overseeing its operation and policies on use.

ALICE is free to use. To achieve this it is vital that researchers provide information about the funding which supports their research and any publications which result from use of ALICE. In certain circumstances it will be possible to use grant funding to buy guaranteed access to the service or expand the available resources.

The system

Hewlett Packard was the winning bidder for the tender, and has provided the system in partnership with Panasas (for the storage) and Bright Computing (for the system management tools).

The system is composed of 256 standard compute nodes, two login nodes, two management nodes and a high performance parallel file system of 100TB capacity. Additionally there are five 'fat' (large memory) nodes and four nodes containing three Tesla GPU cards.

All of these components are connected by a fast Infiniband network.

Each standard compute node has a pair of quad-core 2.67GHz Intel Xeon X5550 CPUs and 12GB of RAM. In total therefore there are 2048 CPU cores available for running jobs.

ALICE is running 64-bit Scientific Linux 5.4, a variant of Redhat Enterprise Linux.

Getting access

In order to use ALICE, please follow these steps:

1. Contact RCS support if necessary to discuss your requirements
2. Request a HPC account (see Getting An Account)
3. Consider signing up to one or more of our Training Courses
   The Introduction to HPC course would be particularly useful, and for those with little experience of Linux, the Introduction to Linux course will be of great help.
4. Read the documentation
   The environment and submitting jobs sections in particular should be studied, in order to become familiar with using the system.
5. Consult the FAQ before contacting support to help with any problems.