Industry Access
Cirrus has been designed to support a wide range of industry applications and EPCC can provide both access to HPC resources and also consultancy to effectively exploit HPC resources.
Please see the dedicated industry solutions page on the EPCC website.
Academic Access Routes
Cirrus is one of the UKRI Tier-2 National HPC facilities and there are number of different academic access routes available.
The table below provides a summary of the different academic access routes.
For new users who want to test out Cirrus for their research, we recommend the Pump Priming or Driving Test routes.
For researchers who need access to larger amounts of resource, the UKRI Access to HPC calls, UKRI grant access or General Academic Access (via EIDF) routes are more suitable.
| Access Route | Availability | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Pump Priming | Any research area | Quick turnaround (1-2 weeks), 6 month research group access, 80,000 coreh max. |
| Driving Test | Any research area | Quick turnaround (1-2 weeks), 12 month access individual access, 20,000 coreh max. |
| Access to HPC | Any research area | Long turnaround, next call due late Spring 2026, Previous (closed) call details |
| UKRI Grant Access | Any research area | Long turnaround (3-6 months), flexible access length and resources |
| General Academic Access (via EIDF) | Any research area | Medium turnaround (2-4 weeks), flexible access length and resources |
Resource Units
Access to Cirrus is currently granted in units of:
- coreh for compute allocations: 1 Cirrus coreh is the equivalent of 1 physical core used for 1 hour
- GiB for disk allocations: 1 GiB is 1048576 kB.