Industry Access
Cirrus has been designed to support a wide range of industry applications and EPCC can provide both access to HPC resources and also consultancy to effectively exploit HPC resources.
Please see the dedicated industry solutions page on the EPCC website.
Academic Access Routes
Cirrus is one of the UKRI Tier-2 National HPC facilities and there are number of different academic access routes available.
The table below provides a summary of the different academic access routes. For new users who want to test out Cirrus for their research, we recommend the Pump Priming or Driving Test routes. For researchers who need access to larger amounts of resource, the UKRI Access to HPC calls, Scottish Academic Access, UoE Director’s Time or grant access routes are more suitable.
| Access Route | Availability | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Pump Priming | Any research area | Quick turnaround (1-2 weeks), 6 month research group access, 80,000 coreh max. |
| Driving Test | Any research area | Quick turnaround (1-2 weeks), 12 month access individual access, 20,000 coreh max. |
| UoE Director’s Time | University of Edinburgh researchers, any research area | Medium turnaround (3-4 weeks), 12 month research group access, 1 Mcoreh max. |
| Scottish Academic Access | Scottish institution researchers, any research area | Medium turnaround (3-4 weeks), 12 month research group access, 1 Mcoreh max. |
| Access to HPC | Any research area | Long turnaround (access start: 1 Jan 2026), deadline: 1600 GMT, 6 Nov 2025, Full details on call page |
| UKRI Grant Access | Any research area | Long turnaround (3-6 months), flexible access length and resources |
Grant access for non-UKRI funding source
If you wish to apply for Cirrus resources on a grant proposal to a non-UKRI funding source, please contact the Cirrus Service Desk in the first instance to discuss.
Resource Units
Access to Cirrus is currently granted in units of:
- Core-h for compute allocations: 1 Cirrus Core-h is the equivalent of 1 physical core used for 1 hour;
- GiB for disk allocations: 1 GiB is 1048576 kB.