Accessibility statement

Research computing

Computing facilites to support your research

How we can help you

  • Research support for all subjects
  • Faster analysis
    • Data that takes 40 days to process on a PC takes just two hours using the research cluster
  • Complex analysis
    • eg spatial analysis, large scale modelling, sound recognition

Facilities at York

Computing servers

The Viking Cluster

Interactive Linux Service

Data Safe Haven

  • Secure environment for undertaking research using personal, sensitive, or confidential data
  • Free at the point of use for all University of York researchers
  • ISO 27001 certified
  • 192 cores, 4.5TB of memory spread over 10 servers
  • See user documentation for the Data Safe Haven

File storage

We can provide additional filestore for shared projects and large datasets.


Database infrastructure

For large and resource intensive database applications.


Virtual servers

For hosting applications that need to be available to multiple people, or that require a server to run.


Space for equipment in our data centres


Create surveys

Our survey tool is designed for researchers.

Research Computing Working Group

The working group involves members across IT Services and academic schools. The group is open to all staff members who are interested in attending.

Learn more about the Research Computing Working Group.

Advice and support

Support in the use of research computing facilities are available - whatever your level of expertise

To find out how the Research and High Performance Computing service can help with your research, please get in touch via the IT Support.

We can advise you on which facilities to use, and how to use them.

Our Research Software Engineers can offer specialized software support and expertise to academics:

Additional guidance on facilities, support and training can be found on our wiki pages:

Regional and national HPC facilities

N8 CIR

The N8 Centre of Excellence in Computationally Intensive Research, N8 CIR, has been awarded £3.1M from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Resources Council to establish a new Tier 2 computing facility in the north of England. This is a novel architecture (32 nodes each containing 2 IBM Power 9 CPUs and 4 Nvidia V100 GPUs, joined with a high performance interconnect) and is designed for specialist workloads, particularly for machine learning and image processing.

This facility "Bede" is free to use for N8 researchers, including those at the University of York, who have a need for this sort of hardware. There is also dedicated RSE support for York researchers interested in
using Bede.

More details, including how to sign up for access, can be found here.


JADE II

The University of York is a partner of the JADE II facility. Anyone who is involved in AI/ML research and related data science applications and in need of GPUs for scaling up experiments can apply for an account.

JADE II harnesses the capabilities of the NVIDIA DGX MAX-Q Deep Learning System and comprise of 63 servers, each containing 8 NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs linked by NVIDIA’s NV link interconnect technology. JADE II uses environment modules and SLURM, similar to Viking.

Apply for an account

Once a user has completed the form, they are sent an email with instructions for registering for JADE 2 at STFC.

There is also a jade2-users slack channel in the UoY workspace for current users.


National facilities

Information on national HPC facilities available to researchers, how to gain access, what training courses are available and links to other useful resources can be found on the HPC website