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ARCHER
General Info
Sponsors	EPSRC
Designers	Cray
Operators	EPSRC
Introduction	March 2014
Retired	February 18, 2020
Peak FLOPS	2.551 petaFLOPS
Price	£43,000,000
Succession
HECToR ARCHER 2

ARCHER (Advanced Research Computing High End Resource) is HECToR's successor, a petascale x86 supercomputer serving as the UK's primary academic research supercomputer. ARCHER begun operations in March 2014 becoming the most powerful system in UK and the 19th most powerful on the TOP500 at the time. ARCHER is expected to be succeeded by ARCHER 2 in 2020.

Overview

ARCHER is based on Cray's XC30 MPP supercomputer.

System

Nodes	4920
CPU	Xeon E5-2697 v2 (12c) @ 2.7 GHz
Cores	118,080
Peak Performance	2.551 petaFLOPS (DP)

Memory

There are 4544 standard memory nodes which have 64 GiB of memory shared between the two CPUs. Additionally, ARCHER features 376 high memory nodes which have 128 GiB of memory.

	Standard	High-Memory	ARCHER
Node	64 GiB	128 GiB
Count	4544	376	4920
Total	47 TiB	284 TiB	331 TiB

Interconnect

ARCHER relies on Cray Aries interconnect to interlink all the nodes. ARCHER uses a Dragonfly topology. There are four compute nodes connected per each Aries router, 188 nodes per cabinet, and two cabinets form a group. Groups are connected to each other with all-to-all optical connections. There are a total of 144 optical links per group for a peak system bisection bandwidth of over 19,013 GB/s. The MPI latency on Aries is ~1.3μs with an additional 100ns of latency when communicating over the optical links.

Power

Type	Power
System (Zero load)	400 kW
System (Full load)	1,200 kW
Filesystems	40 kW
Research Data Facility (RDF)	120 kW

External links

• Official Website https://www.archer.ac.uk/