ECDF - The Edinburgh Compute and Data Facility

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Please include a citation of the ECDF in all publications of research that has used the ECDF.

What is the ECDF?

The ECDF is a high-performance cluster of servers (1456 processors) and storage (over 275Tb of disk) which is available to researchers from, and associated with, the University of Edinburgh.

More detailed information is available here.

Why would I want to use the ECDF?

The ECDF can cut the time taken to compute problems by running the software in parallel, or by breaking the problem into many pieces, each of which can be run on a separate cpu in parallel. Examples of the speed improvements that researchers have realised already are in Psychiatry, where processing of brain scans from a Schizophrenia study took 28 hours instead of 469 days, and a protein structure prediction study which involved 810,000 simulations and used 1.5 CPU years of computation in less than 2 days.

How do I use the ECDF?

The ECDF offers two services -

a guaranteed service, which provides a higher priority for each user's jobs. Charges for this service include an element of capital which will contribute to replacing the hardware in due course.
a baseline service, where jobs are likely to take longer to execute. Charges for this service include power and staff costs only. In the College of Science and Engineering, the bill for baseline use is sent to Heads of School.

It is hoped that research groups in all Colleges will include ECDF in future grant proposals, so that most usage will eventually be of the guaranteed service.

If you would like access to the ECDF, please click the Access and Registration button in the menu to the left, or contact us for further information.

Who is using the ECDF?

Case studies from users of the ECDF are available.

In association with