Hardware

We take a "building block" approach to EIDF, to give it the flexibility it needs. EIDF's main hardware partner is HPE and we work with them to procure hardware on a rolling basis.

EIDF's hardware is the least interesting part of it! The hardware forms a low-level infrastructure layer and is largely hidden from service users. On top of the hardware is what we call the virtualised "platform layer", and on top of that we create the services that users generally interact with.

EIDF is located at EPCC's Advanced Computing Facility on the edge of Edinburgh, in a purpose-built, high-resilience computer room called CR4. 

Current hardware

  • E1000 Clusterstor "hot" storage (20 PB Lustre parallel file system)
  • Ceph "warm" storage (5 PB flexible block storage)
  • MSA "warm" block storage (1 PB)
  • Nimble "very hot" storage (1 PB)
  • 2 x matching SpectraLogic tape archives driven by HPE DMF
  • HPE ProLiant host servers for c. 300 large VMs (Intel Xeon Platinum and AMD Epyc CPUs)
  • HPE Apollo new generation GPU servers (V100 and A100)
  • 2 x HPE SuperDome Flex large-memory systems (18 TB RAM)
  • Cerebras CS-2 wafer-scale AI engine

 

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