Farewell to ARCHER

ARCHER: the UK’s National HPC Service 2013-2021

The ARCHER system was finally switched off in January 2021. Funded by EPSRC and NERC, this remarkable service was the UK’s National HPC Service for over seven years.

ARCHER began life in late 2013. Over the whole lifetime of the service, just over 5.7 billion core hours were used for computation, with over 5.6 million jobs submitted. That’s a lot of resource for UK science. Many people have benefited from ARCHER, with around 3300 users, with PhD (or other post-graduate research degree participants) forming the largest cohort. This is closely followed by post-doctoral researchers. While ARCHER entered service at number 20 in the TOP500 list, the goal has always been to deliver world class science by supporting an active and diverse community of users from across a wide spectrum of science areas. The range of science carried out on the service has been significant with the software used being quite broad. To give an idea of the spread, the top 10 applications by use account for around 55% of the total use, the top 20 applications by use account for around 68%, and the top 40 account for around 78% (we identify use from 68 research software packages). Around 20% of use is not associated with known research software packages. The five most heavily used codes (VASP, GROMACS, the Unified Model, CASTEP and CP2K) have all utilised over 100 million core hours each. EPCC supported the service during the lifetime of ARCHER, which including handling queries, offering training and providing in-depth user support. The User Support and Systems teams (SP) resolved 57,489 contractual queries with 98.6% of them completed within two days. The ARCHER team has also created 6,926 users accounts, which have formed our very broad user base. This ranges from our novice Driving Test users to our very experienced users. ARCHER served its users well. There was a steady utilisation over the lifetime of the service, with it effectively operating around maximum capacity for the majority of the lifetime. Lorna Smith, EPCC l.smith@epcc.ed.ac.uk

Metadynamics simulations opening the active site of the SARS-CoV-2 main protease. Image by Mohamed Ali Al-Badri & Khaled Abdel-Maksoud, King’s College London, Department of Physics & University of Southampton, School of Chemistry.

Science enabled by ARCHER has been showcased through a series of case studies, highlighting work around many of society’s grand challenges. Most recently, ARCHER has been used in the fight against COVID, for example through pandemic modelling. You can explore the case studies on the website at: https://www.archer.ac.uk/ casestudies/ The entries to our annual image and video competition is also hosted on the ARCHER website. Last year’s winner is shown opposite. https://www.archer2.ac.uk/about/ gallery/ Throughout ARCHER’s lifetime we aimed to provide an accessible and inclusive service. For example, providing accessible training materials; founding the Women in High Performance Computing initiative; inviting early-career observers to eCSE panel meetings; and delivering a set of outreach activities aimed at underrepresented groups. Back in February 2015, a little over a year after the ARCHER service began, EPCC launched an entirely new and innovative access route, for users to have time on ARCHER via a “Driving Test”. The idea behind this was to help those who had never used ARCHER, or possibly any high performance computing (HPC) resource, to gain a small amount of time to familiarise themselves with the HPC environment. The Driving Test has proven to be extremely popular and successful. Since its launch almost five years ago, we have had 587 people pass the test and 455 of them have signed up for an account. 70,460 jobs have been run, using 279,638 kAUs in total. So as we look back on the ARCHER service we also look forward to ARCHER2 (see p14), which I am confident will see the UK HPC community continue to deliver world-class science.

Many thanks to EPCC’s Jo Beech-Brandt, Clair Barrass, and Andy Turner for supplying statistics and other contributions for this article. ARCHER website https://www.archer.ac.uk ARCHER2 website https://www.archer2.ac.uk