Research Computing Support

Computer room Most research in the Department of Mathematics is done on Linux or UNIX-like computers and a range of facilities, backed by a rich & heterogenous infrastructure, are on offer to all members of the department including:

  • a comprehensive collection of networked applications and packages including Magma, Matlab, Mathematica, Maple, R and Sage
  • a 35 node Linux compute cluster with 356 processor cores
  • a GPU cluster with three 512-core nodes and two 2048 core nodes
  • a part-time FreeBSD-based distributed parallel compute cluster with over 500 processor cores
  • a 15 node Hadoop cluster with 456 processor cores, 864 GB of memory and 147 TB of storage for research using 'Big Data' techniques
  • several fully backed-up large scale data storage facilities with a total capacity of over 600 terabytes
  • several specialist servers for applications such as the RStudio IDE
  • a varied collection of Linux stand-alone computers for individual use
  • access to the central HPC facilities

In addition to these public facilities, departmental sections, research groups and individuals have their own IT facilities which themselves account for about 75% of the installed servers and network equipment.

The department also hosts one of the four CRAN (Comprehensive R Archive Network) mirror sites in the UK.

All documentation for the research facilities is maintained on the web rather than in paper form and is known colloquially as the sysnews pages. These are updated frequently and the current status of the various services is updated whenever an event occurs (some of the services have 'live' status pages that update in real time).

Quick links

People

Support for research computing is provided by Andy Thomas, the Research Computing Manager, who provides programming support, in-house software development and operating system support for the Linux and UNIX computers used by research users. Although he is mainly responsible for running the department's research infrastructure, for a bit of light relief he can also help you with your personal web pages, web programming and SQL databases.

His office is in Huxley 6m46 but the best way to contact him is either via email or by phone on 07866 556626. Support is available most of the time but he does need to sleep sometimes ;-)