Imperial College provides research computing resources for all College researchers, with the standard service for these being free at the point of use. Read our RCS charging structure web page for more information and advice.

Our systems are general purpose computing resources and if you are working with sensitive personal data, even if anonymised, please consult with the RCS Service Manager before commencing work. You must be registered in order to access the RCS systems.

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Get access to High Performance Computing

The High Performance Computing service provided by Imperial College is available for all College researchers, the standard service is free at the point of use. It is assumed that all users of Imperial College’s HPC service agree to the terms and conditions of use.  

You must be registered in order to access the HPC service: 

  • Permanent academic staff: please register yourself for access. Once you are registered you may register members of your group. Please note that by doing so, you accept responsibility for their behaviour on the systems. (Please note you can only access our registration pages whilst connected to the College network).  

  • Post-docs, PhD and research postgraduate students: please contact your group leader or supervisor who will be able to register you. 

  • Undergraduates and taught postgraduates: our systems are for research only. If you are working on a computational project your supervisor may elect to register you. Please consult with them. 

  • Academic visitors: visitors will require a college account (NOT just a guest account). To do this,a generic request should be made by the hosting department’s nominated  ICT Contact. This request should be a for "An external user account  for HPC access", and must include the full name, business email and affiliation of the visitor, as well as the name of the hosting researcher at IC, and also an expiry date (max one year). Once the account has been created, it can be enrolled as service user by any permanent member of academic staff (see above).

Get access to the Research Data Store

Every project on the Research Data Store must be associated with an active research project grant or GL code, regardless as to whether there will ultimately be any charges against that grant. If you are the Principal Investigator, registered Co-Investigator or have been granted delegated access to a project code, you may register for one or more RDS projects via our self-service portal (college network or VPN access required). The same self-service portal may also be used to monitor usage and grant access to other users.

Non-project account codes may also be used to register RDS projects but they do not receive any standard entitlement and you must contact us first before trying to register a project in the self-service portal.

Once you have created an RDS project, please go to the RDS user guide for further information on accessing and managing your RDS project.