Condenser

Condenser is a private cloud platform for UCL. Based on traditional High-Performance Computing (HPC) hardware, the platform uses virtualisation and containerisation technologies to support a variety of services- from web applications to HPC clusters and Trusted Research Environments (TREs). Condenser is designed to enable cost-effective, cloud-native research computing at UCL.

Condenser is developed and maintained by the Environments team within the Advanced Research Computing Centre. Users can refer to our Documentation for developers for advice about deploying virtual resources on Condenser.

By the numbers

Condenser comprises a large pool of computing resources, including:

• 8160 cores
• 85TB RAM
• 25 GbE interconnect
• A100, H100, and H200 GPUs

Technology stack

Condenser is developed using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) methodologies. Some of the technologies used to build the platform are:

Edge	Fortinet
Platform	Rancher, Harvester, K3s
Deployment	Terraform, Packer
Hardware	Lenovo, Nvidia, IBM,