Home / Compute

ARCHER2 Pump Priming

www.archer2.ac.uk/support-access/accessNational HPC allocationcompute/archer2-pump-primingJSON compare report an error provider JSON

Free allowance: Pump Priming is always open and awards a maximum of 4,000 CU for six months through a light-touch form sent to the service desk, with a decision expected in under two weeks; the Driving Test awards 800 CU including GPU nodes to new users, and Director's Time is always open but restricted to...
Verdict: fails: identitythe identity required is not reachable without it
Cost: free tier
Identity: institutionno card, no phone
Binding limit: write-gatedPump Priming is open only to researchers within the EPSRC remit, meaning eligibility for UKRI EPSRC funding and a UK research organisation, so the form is light but the applicant still needs a UK institutional base.
Evidence: documented4 sources; a first-party page was read and the sentence quoted
Freshness: stale on 2026-11-22checked 2026-10-22 (live); stale on 2026-11-22

Free tier	Pump Priming is always open and awards a maximum of 4,000 CU for six months through a light-touch form sent to the service desk, with a decision expected in under two weeks; the Driving Test awards 800 CU including GPU nodes to new users, and Director's Time is always open but restricted to University of Edinburgh researchers. unit users; metered on wall-clock; exploratory / pump-priming allocation
Price	none stated
Limits	write-gated (binding) Pump Priming is open only to researchers within the EPSRC remit, meaning eligibility for UKRI EPSRC funding and a UK research organisation, so the form is light but the applicant still needs a UK institutional base. source
Identity	institution not published
Egress	not stated
Interface	unknown inferred from the tooling the provider documents; not probed
Tooling	not stated
Composes with	The Driving Test gets a new user onto the GPU nodes for 800 CU, and Pump Priming then carries the same code to 4,000 CU, so the two compose into a single ramp inside one national system.
Reliability	no reliability event recorded
Notes	The always-open, form-only structure makes this the closest UK analogue to the trial tiers found in Germany and the US, and the sub-two-week decision is faster than any peer-reviewed call. The binding term is 'EPSRC remit', which is a funding-eligibility test rather than a nationality test, but it still resolves to a UK research organisation. CU means CPU-hour equivalent on ARCHER2 and is not a GPU-hour unit, so no conversion is offered.
Parsed numbers	has-free-tier 1

Evidence 4

date	source	what it proved
2026-10-22	www.archer2.ac.uk/support-access/access	Pump-priming row: 'Always open', 'EPSRC remit only. Small amounts of time for testing and porting. Quick decision on access. Maximum of 4000 CU for 6 months', quoted
2026-10-22	www.archer2.ac.uk/support-access/access	'We expect decisions to be made in less than 2 weeks (and usually much sooner). A maximum of 4000 CU for 6 months are currently available through Pump Priming', quoted
2026-10-22	www.archer2.ac.uk/support-access/access	'A small allocation (800 CU) for new ARCHER2 users to get them started using the ARCHER2 Service ... Includes access to GPU nodes', quoted
2026-10-22	www.archer2.ac.uk/support-access/access	'Director's Time ... Small amount of resource is available for University of Edinburgh researchers only', quoted

More fields 1

facets	`{"class": "national-hpc","free_tier_kind": "exploratory / pump-priming allocation","shape": {"vcpu": null,"ram_gib": null,"gpu_class": "AMD MI210 (4 GPU nodes, 8 GPUs each)","gpu_count": null}}`

Unknown values 7

egress metered: egress metering was not published
egress terms: a source was read and is silent on this field
interface: the access interface was not established
per object cap stated: the field does not apply to this kind of offer
reliability note: nothing of this kind was observed
retention stated: the field does not apply to this kind of offer
tooling: a source was read and is silent on this field