March 12, 2024 — The Edinburgh Napier University inaugural HPC/AI cluster is housed at the Jack Kilby Computing Centre, only a few meters away from the birthplace of the university’s namesake, John Napier.

The Alces Flight Crew was pleased to attend the launch of the Edinburgh Napier University HPC/AI Cluster, “ENUCC,” on February 26th at their Merchiston campus. This location is a fitting home for the cluster as it is not only at the epicentre of their primary research facilities for HPC/AI but also steps from the birthplace of John Napier, the university’s namesake.

John Napier, also known as the 8th Laird of Merchiston, was a 16th-century mathematician, physicist, and astronomer who worked tirelessly towards creating mechanisms for simplifying mathematical calculations, as well as introducing the common usage of the decimal point. His revolutionary goals of breaking down barriers in a field that, at the time, required a heavy level of complex language understanding led to his nickname of “Marvellous Merchiston.” It is fitting that a little over 400 years later, near the site of his birth, a supercomputer would be built to carry on his ideals.

The ENUCC cluster includes the latest Dell EMC hardware and features AMD EPYC3 compute and high-memory nodes and NVIDIA A100 GPUs. A high-performance Lustre NVME scratch storage tier is also included, with DellEMC PowerScale long-term storage. ENUCC has been built and is managed by Alces Flight alongside the team at the School of Computing, Engineering, and the Built Environment (SCEBE), with the aim of being available to all Edinburgh Napier students and researchers wishing to access this system.

The launch event was kicked off by Prof. Peter Andras, Dean of SCEBE, who gave a talk showcasing the planned diversity of projects for ENUCC, including the launch of boot camps designed specifically to welcome those interested in exploring HPC and AI within their research. His words focused on the steps of progress and the aim of ENUCC being a bed of ingenuity to help scale ideas into fully-formed projects and workflows across a number of disciplines. Following Prof. Andras’s talk, the teams at Alces Flight and Dell took to the floor to highlight the features of ENUCC and tell the stories behind its formation, including a nod to the work of John Napier and the open-facing logo for the cluster – chosen specifically to welcome all who wish to work within the field of HPC/AI.

A light reception followed and was attended by incoming cluster users as well as the faculty and staff of SCEBE who worked tirelessly to ensure its successful completion. The SCEBE team is pleased to also announce that ENUCC boot camps are now well underway, and those interested in cluster access can check https://staff.napier.ac.uk/services/cit/Pages/ENU-Compute-Cluster.aspx for the next set of dates and times.