Manchester Condor Pool provides researchers with 2 million+ CPU hours

26 Jul 2011

IS staff in the Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences have been putting hundreds of desktop computers in student clusters, with thousands of cores, to good use as part of a supercomputer called The Manchester Condor Pool.

Since January, 2 million CPU hours have been provided, the equivalent of almost 230 years of compute time. The pool's capacity and number of users is growing all the time and there is no charge for this facility to the University’s research community. Outside of cluster opening hours, when students can still access the computers, this resource has supported researchers in areas as diverse as Materials Science, Economics, Computational Biology, Text Mining and Chemistry. 

The EPS IS team are already working with colleagues to make this technology more accessible across the University. Strategically this will form part of what could be considered the University’s compute cloud, building upon the success of the Computational Shared Facility. Other Faculties are looking into how they can participate and provide compute power from their clusters.

For more information:

• See Condor website
  or
• email eps-condor@manchester.ac.uk