NEWS: (For upcoming and current incidents, see the Status page)
2025-12-01: No new Protected accounts are commissioned and existing Regular accounts can no longer be changed to Protected accounts.
2025-09-31: GPU compute nodes are now reserved for GPU tasks. Non-GPU jobs, that is, jobs that do not request -q gpu.q, will no long end up on a GPU compute node. This removes the risk of CPU-only jobs starving out GPU jobs.
2025-09-23: Protected (P3 and P4) storage and accounts will be decommissions by 2026-01-26.
2025-07-08: Termination of Wynton Support for P4/PHI data. Starting today, all work on P4/PHI level data must be ceased and all P4/PHI data removed from Wynton.
2025-04-22: PHI Freeze: Effective immediately, we are pausing requests for new projects that process P4 data, specifically Protected Health Information (PHI).
2025-01-16: The memory limit on development nodes was decreased from 68 GiB to 48 GiB, in order to further lower the risk for these machines to run low on memory resulting in non-responsiveness.
Wynton HPC is a large, shared high-performance compute (HPC) cluster underlying UCSF’s Research Computing Capability. Funded and administered cooperatively by UCSF campus IT and key research groups, it is available to all UCSF researchers, and consists of different profiles suited to various biomedical and health science computing needs. Researchers can participate using the “co-op” model of resource contribution and sharing. The Wynton HPC environment grew as more users discovered it and more groups bought into the co-op model. Each contributing member brings more resources and compute power for everyone based on a fair-share model where contributors get higher access priority than non-contributing members. In addition, several UCSF centers have joined by contributing a large amount of their compute hardware to the cluster, e.g. Memory and Aging Center and QB3.
The Wynton HPC environment is available for free to all UCSF researchers. To join, please follow the instructions for requesting an account.
Please note, all Protected (P3 and P4) data will be removed by 2026-01-26. P4 data, which includes Protected Health Information (PHI), is prohibited as of 2025-07-08. Users with Wynton Protected account should prioritize removing remaining Protected data from Wynton. See “Wynton Protected” for UCSF’s P1-P4 classification standards and UCSF alternatives for storing Protected data.
Wynton HPC has been a vital resource for UCSF’s computational research, providing shared HPC capabilities to support diverse scientific projects. However, Wynton HPC is being gradually phased out to align with UCSF’s evolving research infrastructure strategy. While Wynton will remain operational for the near term, researchers are encouraged to plan for its eventual absorption into the Facility for Advanced Computing (FAC) and CoreHPC. UCSF is committed to supporting researchers during this transition and ensuring continued access to robust computational resources.
For more details on the upcoming changes, visit the Wynton Transition Keeping You Informed page.