Grants & acknowledgements

Acknowledgement

If you have used Viking in your research we request you acknowledge Viking on your paper submissions. We have provided some standard text below.

Please include the following statement in any written or published work arising from use of the Viking resources in the period 2023-2028:

“The Viking cluster was used during this project, which is a high performance compute facility provided by the University of York. We are grateful for computational support from the University of York, , IT Services and the Research IT team…”

Publications

Please let us know if you have published work that used Viking. There are two ways to do this. Either through Pure or filling in a google form (you only need to choose one method whichever is most convenient to you).

Pure

Instructions on how to associate Viking with Pure projects, outputs, impacts or other content, can be found at How do I associate Viking in Pure.

Google form

We have also set up a form if you wish to submit published work details.

Supporting Statements for grant submission

It is not possible to purchase extra dedicated slots on Viking or more recently add extra hardware. But if you are putting together a grant application you can sometimes add in-kind contributions from the University. Viking has been costed at 2p per cpu hour.

Short statement

The University of York has invested £2.5 million in a high performance compute cluster. The “Viking” cluster will continue to be a transformative resource for the University, and has been designed to meet a wide mix of research requirements. Viking is hosted in a carbon neutral data centre. EcoDatacentre is powered using 100% renewable energies, utilises heat recovery from hardware transforming surplus energy producing wood pellets, a clean and renewable fuel source and their physical structures are made from sustainable materials such as wood. This means the environmental impact of computational research has be accounted for and it reduced.

It is made available to all researchers, including students, and is free of charge to use. It provides:

  • 12,864 AMD EPYC3 cores

  • 48 nVidia A40 GPUs

  • 12 nVidia H100 GPUs

  • 1.5 PB of high performance working storage

  • 215 TB NVME

  • High performance networking

  • The ability to burst into public cloud services

The technical facility is backed up with staff support, including central and departmentally embedded posts, providing assistance with usage of HPC facilities, data management, research software engineering and code optimisation.

Researchers also have access to the full range of centrally provided services, detailed in the service catalogue at https://www.york.ac.uk/it-services/services/

Longer statement (including other parts of IT Services)

The University of York is committed to enhancing its position as one of the world’s premier institutions for inspirational and life-changing research.. Supporting research is one of five programmes in the IT strategy, alongside Departmental and Faculty IT, and as such we are able to offer a number of services to academics. Through doing this we hope to free up time and resources that can be funnelled solely towards research objectives. The University has invested £2.5 million towards a new HPC facility (Viking) and will provide academics with the latest computing infrastructure for all their computational workloads. This investment is indicative of the drive to give researchers access to the best facilities possible, and has the potential to be a trans-formative resource.

Viking is hosted in a carbon neutral data centre. EcoDatacentre is powered using 100% renewable energies, utilises heat recovery from hardware transforming surplus energy producing wood pellets, a clean and renewable fuel source and their physical structures are made from sustainable materials such as wood. This means the environmental impact of computational research has been accounted for and is reduced.

It is made available to all researchers, including students, and is free of charge to use. It provides:

  • 12,864 AMD EPYC3 cores

  • 48 nVidia A40 GPUs

  • 12 nVidia H100 GPUs

  • 1.5 PB of high performance working storage

  • 215 TB NVME

  • High performance networking

Additional support is provided through storage for datasets, where we provide 1-2TB of free storage for all principal investigators. We will also provide a cost effective storage solution for large datasets. Recognising the importance of impact in research, we also provide a dynamic web hosting platform, and virtual machines, free of charge, allowing research to be published to the web in dynamic and interesting ways, and allowing the public and researchers to interact with it.

In addition to providing commodity and research services, we also have a team dedicated to research IT. In addition to a Head of Research IT, based centrally, we have an embedded team comprised of six Research Software Engineers and three FTE on the infrastructure side. These staff are based in Biology, Physics and Chemistry, but as part of a wider strategy they support research across the institution, and are actively involved in central HPC development.

A full list of central services is provided in the service catalogue, available at https://www.york.ac.uk/it-services/services/