High Performance Computing
Accelerate your research or use HPC in your teaching
You can also use Bristol's HPC systems in your teaching. Get HPC resources for your teaching.
BlueCrystal 4
BlueCrystal Phase 4 (BC4) is available to all HPC users at the University of Bristol and is capable of up to 600 trillion calculations per second. The environment supports large parallel jobs and has a number of Nvidia P100 GPUs. Apply for access Costing your HPC research
BluePebble
BluePebble is also available to all researchers across the University of Bristol and is optimised for high throughput computing. The environment has also got a number of GPUs and accelerators, large memory and other specialised requirements. Apply for access Costing your HPC research
BlueCryo
The ACRC team installed and currently maintains the BBSRC funded BlueCryo high-performance computing (HPC) cluster dedicated to image processing for the GW4 Cryo-EM facility which supports pioneering cryo-microsopy research at the University of Bristol.
Costing your HPC research
Wherever possible, the costs of your use of Bristol's HPC facilities should be included in your research grant application. By factoring the cost into your grant applications, you will support essential cost recovery, helping to sustain and enhance this critical research facility.
Other Bristol HPC Facilities
Isambard 3 is now open to Bristol researchers who have exclusive access to a proportion of the compute resources.
Apply for access to Isambard 3
To apply for access, simply complete the short Project Allocation Call application form which includes a compliance assessment.
Isambard 3 technical capabilities
Apply to use Isambard-AI via the UK's AIRR calls
The UK's AI Research Resource (AIRR), which comprises Isambard-AI and the Dawn compute services, is available to researchers who need to run large-scale AI jobs.
We strongly encourage you to apply to use Isambard-AI via the national Expression of Interest (EoI) call for applications issued by the UK's AI Research Resource (AIRR).
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
The ARCHER National supercomputer is primarily funded by EPSRC and NERC. If you wish to use Archer you will need to apply for resources on the ARCHER system. It is often useful to have performed test runs on BlueCrystal 4 to support your application.
An overview of the UK's National HPC Facilities for research, their capabilities and access criteria can be found on hpc-uk.ac.uk.
ACRC News
New 'Introduction to HPC at University of Bristol' video
minimalmarkers: Accelerating a genotyping script from 10 days to 34 seconds to reduce its environmental impact. Read how this research acceleration was achieved with Research Software Enginneering support.