Like NESRC, which recently celebrated the launch of the Edison machine, the University of Edinburgh welcomes its own CRAY XC30, christened ARCHER, due to replace HECToR (a CRAY XE6, like Edison’s predecessor, that was put in production just seven years ago). ARCHER, short for Academic Research Computing High End Resource, is part of the resources available to the academic research of the British Crown and connected to the UK Research Data Facility network.

The machine, totaling 1.56 Pflops peak, features the latest 12-core Intel Xeon E5 v2, two in each of the 3008 nodes dispatched in 16 cabinets. The CPUs are connected through the CRAY Aries network interface. As at NESRC, scientists can already use the machine, simply by recompiling their applications with the provided suite of tools, namely compilers from CRAY, Intel and GNU.