High Performance Computing
Solve your research problems or use high performance computing in your teaching
BlueCrystal 5
The University is investing in a new contemporary x86-based HPC service for research and teaching which will gradually replace BlueCrystal 4.
Your new BlueCrystal 5 HPC service
BlueCrystal 4 and BluePebble
Bristol's main HPC environments, BlueCrystal 4 (BC4) and BluePebble, are available to all staff, honorary staff and post graduate students.
Supporting large-scale parallel jobs both systems have hundreds of CPUs as well as Nvidia P100 GPUs, and are capable of up to 600 trillion calculations per second.
BlueCryo
ACRC maintains the BBSRC funded BlueCryo HPC cluster dedicated to image processing for the GW4 Cryo-EM facility which supports pioneering cryo-microsopy research at the University of Bristol.
Bristol Centre for Supercomputing (BriCS)
Isambard 3 and Isambard-AI
The University's new supercomputers, Isambard 3 and Isambard-AI, are now open to Bristol researchers who have exclusive access to a proportion of the these cutting-edge compute resources.
You can apply for access to Isambard 3 and Isambard-AI via an internal University of Bristol application process and via the UKRI's national access calls. The national calls are particular aimed at researchers who need large-scale compute resources.
We strongly encourage you to make the most of these two new cutting edge supercomputers.
Find out more and apply for access.
UK HPC Facilities
JADE (Joint Academic Data science Endeavour)
JADE is one of the EPSRC Tier-2 HPC facilities. The system design exploits the capabilities of NVIDIA's DGX-1 Deep Learning System which has eight of its newest Tesla P100 GPUs tightly coupled by its high-speed NVlink interconnect. The DGX-1 runs optimized versions of many standard machine learning software packages such as Caffe, TensorFlow, Theano and Torch. Free access is available to academic researchers working in the EPSRC domain and from some UK universities; academic users from other domains and institutions can purchase access. Industry access is available.
ARCHER - UK National Supercomputer
ARCHER 2 is a national supercomputing service funded by EPSRC and NERC that supports academic research in the UK.
The system has 5,860 compute nodes each with two AMD 7420 64-core processors and 256 GB or 512 GB DDR4 RAM. There are 750,080 CPU cores available to researchers on ARCHER2 along with over 15 PB of storage and an extensive suite of modelling and simulation packages and supporting software.
Other HPC Facilities
View all UK HPC facilities for research. Find out about capabilities and access criteria.
EuroHPC
Through the UK's membership of EuroHPC, University of Bristol researchers can apply for access to nine peta- and exascale European supercomputers.
UK researchers can also apply for Horizon Europe funded EuroHPC Research & Innovation calls in partnership with other European research institutions.