CoLCC HPC Centre

Contact

Technical Support Group
4.20 Malet Place Engineering Building
UCL Computer Science
WC1E 7JE

The ‘Lucky’ High Performance Compute (HPC) Cluster is a state-of-the-art compute facility housed by the UCL Computer Science Department. Consisting of over 100 compute nodes, users have access to a versatile and high scaling service.

High Performance Computing Service

The CoLCC HPC service is an efficient and focused HPC service. Thanks to the funding from CRUK, the CoLCC HPC service has procured 100 compute nodes, and 10PB of storage. Due to the hosting in UCL Computer Science, the service is part of a wider computing ecosystem, which provides users with access to over 1000 compute nodes and 300k+ GPU cores.

The centre also provides access to some specialist node types, including the ‘Lucky’ machines, which contain 3TB of RAM. This allows for large datasets to be processed entirely within the RAM of the machine, giving us the capability to perform computation not usually possible on existing compute facilities.

Research Data Storage

The CoLCC HPC Centre provides 10PB of dedicated networked storage for cluster users, allowing for the use of large datasets and high volume jobs.

Training

We offer a comprehensive support service, starting with bi-weekly induction sessions offered to every user at the point of onboarding. These are done in small groups, and tailored to the users research topics and software requirements.

There are bi-monthly on-site drop-in sessions scheduled, allowing users to have in-person assistance at their workplace (currently suspended due to the pandemic).

Once users have got started with their work, we offer dedicated pipelining support, with our cluster support staff happy to have one-to-one sessions with researchers to help optimise and debug their pipelines.

Other Facilities

As well as compute, UCL Computer Science also offers CoLCC members access to a large array of other services, including:

Web hosting
Virtual Machines
Slack-like collaboration tools (hosted in-house)
Video Conferencing (hosted in-house)

Rocket Chat

Rocket chat allows to grow our expert network without compromising chat history. On Rocket.Chat all conversation history is saved. It is equipped with functions that down the line help us centralize communication to one single location. Rocket Chat is available for everyone in CoLCC with a cluster account. You can access by going to rc.cs.ucl.ac.uk in your web browser or download the rocket chat client application from here using your cluster account credentials to log in. If you have any issue accessing it , please contact us at cluster-support@cs.ucl.ac.uk

Full instructions on how to use the Rocket char can be found here