ARCHER 2
ARCHER2 is the UK’s national supercomputing service (Tier-1), providing world-class HPC capability to accelerate discovery across engineering, climate and weather, earth and environmental sciences, chemistry and materials, physics, and life sciences. Funded by UKRI (EPSRC and NERC) and hosted by EPCC at the University of Edinburgh, ARCHER2 serves researchers across UK universities, research institutes, and approved industry and public-sector partners. It replaces and extends the capabilities of the original ARCHER system, offering far greater capacity, performance, and reliability for large-scale simulation, modelling, and data-intensive workloads.
Technically, ARCHER2 is an HPE Cray EX system designed for scalable, CPU-only high performance computing. It comprises thousands of dual-socket AMD EPYC nodes—amounting to around three-quarters of a million CPU cores—connected by the HPE Slingshot high-bandwidth, low-latency interconnect. The platform features large, high-performance parallel filesystems and a mature software environment built around the Cray Programming Environment, with GNU and other compilers, optimized math and domain libraries, Cray MPI, and container support via Apptainer/Singularity. This combination enables strong scaling for MPI/OpenMP applications and smooth porting and optimization of both open-source and commercial codes.
ARCHER2 is designed for productivity, efficiency, and ease of use. Users access a familiar environment with the Slurm scheduler, extensive documentation, training courses, and responsive helpdesk support from EPCC. The system is housed in the University of Edinburgh’s energy‑efficient data centre, with detailed monitoring and operational best practices to support sustainable HPC at scale. Access is available through UKRI allocation routes (including EPSRC RAP, standard grants, and consortia), with dedicated training and consultancy to help research teams scale up and make the most of the service.