ABSTRACT
ARCHER is the latest UK national high-performance computing service and is funded by two major UK research councils—the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the Natural Environment Research Council. EPSRC users typically work on Chemistry, Materials, Physics, Computational Fluid Dynamics, and Engineering. NERC users work on Ocean Modelling, Atmospheric Science, and Mineral Physics. EPSRC, as managing agent for ARCHER, set up a technical procurement working group consisting of representatives from both users and service providers. The draft Statement of Requirements was published in October 2012 and vendors were encouraged to submit initial responses. As computer systems have become power-hungry, the equipment suppliers have moved towards liquid-cooling with an increase in cooling water temperatures enabling the optimized plant to maximize efficiency and mimimize the cooling overhead. One of the big advantages of this single integrated system is that it can easily be extended to allow many operations to be delegated to appropriate users.
