Any academic researcher can get access to Cirrus via the Edinburgh International Data Facility.
Resources available
This access route is flexible in terms of the amount of resource that can be applied for. For 12 months of access projects have typically requested 500,000 – 3,000,000 coreh and storage of 100 – 100,000 GiB but larger projects are possible and smaller projects can gain Cirrus access via this route too.
In the list of resources available on the EIDF list, the following are relevant to Cirrus:
Compute Services:
- CPU-only in the Cirrus cluster - use this to indicate the number of coreh you require
Storage:
- CephFS with 3-copies redundancy - this corresponds to the amount of space you require on the Cirrus home file system
- e1000 - this corresponds to the amount of space you require on the Cirrus work file system (accessible to compute nodes)
Other EIDF services that can be used directly from Cirrus include:
- EIDF S3 without backup - EIDF S3 storage can be accessed from Cirrus login and compute nodes
Application procedure
Follow the EIDF Access Process.
Billing and payment
EIDF resources (including Cirrus) are generally billed quarterly and you only pay for the resources you use.
If you use less resources than quoted during your EIDF application, you will only be charged the reduced charge corresponding to actual usage. If you wish to use more resources than quoted in your application, and have the funding to support additional use, you can get in touch with us during your project to request this facility and, if capacity allows, we can enable this.
You must be able to submit a Purchase Order (PO) to the University of Edinburgh to allow us to invoice you for usage charges. The EIDF application process provides a quote for services that you can use to raise this PO.