ICF (Informatics Compute Facility)

The Informatics Compute Facility (ICF) provides access to the use of a GPU compute cluster, running on servers managed as a Small Research Facility.

The ICF provides a:

• Paid tier for research uses only with access available to:
  • PGR students who are enrolled on School of Informatics programmes
  • Students who are enrolled on School of Informatics CDTs
  • Principal Investigators and their research teams involved in grant funded projects administered by the School of Informatics
• Free tier split into:
  • An allocation for teaching uses only with access to UG and PGT students enrolled on School of Informatics programmes and courses
  • An allocation for research uses only with access to School of Informatics academic staff, research staff and PGR students as well as sponsored collaborators (external to the School of Informatics or University of Edinburgh)
• Hardware purchase split into:
  • The ICF provides a framework for reserach groups to purchase hardware and integrate it into the DICE compute environment, this allows users to access both Free provision and their own hardware running on DICE from the same environment.

Access to the paid tier will also be made available to other University of Edinburgh PGR students, CDT students and PIs; however, this is not anticipated at the outset, and only if there is sufficient capacity that the needs of the School of Informatics can still be safely accommodated.

Accessing the cluster

Access to the Cluster is via ssh access to one of the two head nodes hastings.inf.ed.ac.uk and stanger.inf.ed.ac.uk. this provides a shell environment with a home directory local to the cluster and access to afs via the /afs/inf.ed.ac.uk/user/... allowing users to move data between the cluster and their dice home directory in a shell environment. Access to the compute nodes is via standard srun and sbatch slurm commands.

Partitions(Queues)

The ICF is implemented via the Following partitions with the associated partitions

Accessing the ICF-Free partition

Everyone should have access to the ICF-Free partition, jobs running on this are not charged and it is available to all registered staff and students. Visitors may use this partition if they have a valid account and have access to a paid GCP. Jobs submitted by research users may be preempted on teaching nodes by jobs submitted by a user on a teaching account. JObs on an ICF-Research node may be preempted by users on a GCP.

Accessing the ICF-Research partition Partitions may be subject to change as we get a feel of scalability

In order to submit jobs to this partition you need to have purchased a GCP and associated CAs. this will give you Access to a paid slurm Account and associated QOSs (Quality of services) which you need to submit jobs against. For more details see

• Purchasing GCPs.
• Submitting ICF jobs against paid accounts.