Over the past month, NUIT have worked with our suppliers to configure Rocket and integrate it into the University’s network and systems, and to test its performance. Once NUIT have completed some more of the work needed on our side to manage Rocket as a service, we will be running a short pilot phase with four volunteers who will be helping us iron out any initial problems and assess the system’s performance for a variety of ‘real’ job types.

During the pilot phase we will also start accepting HPC project registrations. When the service is live, all access to Rocket will be controlled by membership of projects, which may be established research projects, taught programs or other groupings – they need not be funded research programmes. Project registration will be via an online form: see http://www.ncl.ac.uk/itservice/research/hpc for more details.

We hope to start widening access to the cluster in September. Watch this space.