Maxwell (For researchers and research projects)


Maxwell is a Linux supercomputing cluster housed in the Edward Wright Datacentre and provides:


  • 1240 CPU cores/10 TB of RAM
  • One Very High Memory Node (4 TB of RAM)
  • Additional high-memory nodes
  • GPUs: 
    • 9 NVIDIA A100s
    • Other standard GPUs
  • Resilient high-speed networks including 100Gb/s InfiniBand interconnects for multi-node MPI jobs and 10Gb to the Campus network
  • Over 1 Petabyte tiered storage including 15TB of very high-performance storage
  • A wide variety of commercial and free HPC-optimized software - see current list
  • Compilers for user-developed applications
  • Galaxy - Access to a Galaxy server which utilises the HPC’s resources. This open-source, web-based platform is designed to make computational biology accessible to researchers who do not have computer programming experience. Galaxy uses a graphical user interface to run software on the worker nodes of the cluster - see current list of software. It allows for workflows to be saved and shared, supporting reproducible and transparent analysis. Researchers at the University of Aberdeen are part of the Galaxy Training Network, which runs subject-specific workshops on Galaxy throughout the academic year
  • Alternatively, for manual instructions for installing and configuring clients, please see the User Guide. 
  • If the above specification is not sufficient for your project, we can help you access National HPC resources.

Macleod (for teaching) 


Macleod is a Linux supercomputing cluster housed in the Edward Wright Datacentre and provides:


  • 120 CPU cores and 1.2TB of RAM - minimum 256GB per node
  • Specialist nodes: Two nodes each with 3xA100 GPU cards providing 21 GPU partitions
  • High-speed network – a 10Gb network
  • Over 50TB scratch storage
  • A wide variety of commercial and free HPC-optimized software
  • Compilers for user-developed applications
  • Galaxy  
    • Access to a Galaxy server which utilises the HPC’s resources. This open-source, web-based platform is designed to make computational biology accessible to researchers who do not have computer programming experience.
    • Galaxy uses a graphical user interface to run software on the worker nodes of the cluster. It allows for workflows to be saved and shared, supporting reproducible and transparent analysis.
    • Researchers at the University of Aberdeen are part of the Galaxy Training Network, which runs subject-specific workshops on Galaxy throughout the academic year.

Where requirements exceed what is available in Macleod and relate to the delivery of a research project, please check out the resources available in Maxwell, the HPC for research.

Any questions? Contact Digital Research at [email protected]