UK HPC User Documentation Sites
This is an index of public user documentation pages for a number of HPC sites, including many UK-based Tier 3 systems. If you would like to propose changes to this list, please open a pull request or contact the project team.
It also includes a minimum viable product (MVP) for a cross-site full-text search over the documentation pages it knows about.
Search¶
Try searching for “PyTorch” to find user guidance for running machine learning models on HPC sites in the UK, search “A100” to see which sites currently advertise this GPU accelerator, or search for “Ollama” to read more about running large-language models (LLMs) on academic HPC.
Implementation note¶
Every week, the links in this page are checked by a software called Lychee. If a broken link is found, an issue is automatically created on the repository containing the website sources.
This custom search engine is currently powered by Google's freemium Programmable Search Engine. It implements a full-text web search using Google's web index that is restricted to only show results from URLs with prefixes derived from the documentation sites listed below (with some inclusions and exclusions).
Unfortunately, it is not possible to programmatically update the scope of the custom search engine as new sites are added.
HPC Documentation Sites¶
HEIs (Tier 3)¶
| Institution | Documentation URL |
|---|---|
| Durham University - Hamilton | dur.ac.uk |
| Imperial College London - RCS | icl-rcs-user-guide.readthedocs.io |
| King's College London - CREATE | docs.er.kcl.ac.uk |
| Liverpool John Moores University - Prospero | prospero-docs.readthedocs.io |
| Oxford University - ARC | arc-user-guide.readthedocs.io |
| Queen Mary University of London - Apocrita | docs.hpc.qmul.ac.uk |
| University College London | rc.ucl.ac.uk |
| University of Aberdeen | uoa.freshservice.com |
| University of Bath | bath.ac.uk |
| University of Birmingham - BEAR | docs.bear.bham.ac.uk |
| University of Bristol - Zoo | uob-hpc.github.io |
| University of Cambridge - Accelerate Programme | docs.science.ai.cam.ac.uk |
| University of Cambridge - HPC | docs.hpc.cam.ac.uk |
| University of Kent | cs.kent.ac.uk |
| University of Leeds - AIRE | arcdocs.leeds.ac.uk |
| University of Leicester - ALICE | alice-docs.le.ac.uk |
| University of Sheffield | docs.hpc.shef.ac.uk |
| University of Strathclyde | docs.hpc.strath.ac.uk |
| University of Surrey | docs.pages.surrey.ac.uk |
| University of York - Viking | vikingdocs.york.ac.uk |
Consortia (Tiers 2 and 1)¶
| Institution | Documentation URL |
|---|---|
| ARCHER2 | docs.archer2.ac.uk |
| Baskerville | docs.baskerville.ac.uk |
| Bede | bede-documentation.readthedocs.io |
| Cirrus | docs.cirrus.ac.uk |
| Crop Diversity | help.cropdiversity.ac.uk |
| DiRAC | dirac.ac.uk |
| DiRAC - Data Intensive (CSD3) | docs.hpc.cam.ac.uk |
| DiRAC - Memory Intensive (COSMA) | cosma.readthedocs.io |
| DiRAC - Extreme Scaling (Tursa) | epcced.github.io |
| DiRAC - Data Intensive (DiaL3) | dial3-docs.dirac.ac.uk |
| Edinburgh International Data Facility | docs.eidf.ac.uk |
| Isambard | docs.isambard.ac.uk |
| JADE | jade.ac.uk |
| JASMIN | help.jasmin.ac.uk |
| MMM Hub - Young | rc.ucl.ac.uk |
| NI-HPC - Kelvin2 | ni-hpc.github.io |
| Sulis | sulis-hpc.github.io |
About this prototype¶
The motivations behind making this information available in one place are as follows:
- Access to HPC by “non-traditional” users, such as those in the arts, humanities, and culture (AH&C) area starts with interactions with local sites, which are getting harder to discover thanks to the growth of university intranets;
- Often, the user documentation implicitly or explicitly describes software that is commonly used at that site, alongside useful insights gained from supporting that software;
- To facilitate detecting trends in the provision of user-facing documentation, such as the prevalence (at the time of writing) of MkDocs as a static site generator.