Researchers at the University, along with other institutions in the Science and Engineering South Consortium (SES) and the wider UK research community, will soon benefit from an influx of funding to support scientific work on computational systems. 
High performance computing (HPC) is crucial to the development of the UK economy, with high impact in areas such as the environment, technology, and health. The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) has awarded £12m to SES institutions towards developing university Tier 2 HPC facilities with a diversity of architectures that are designed to provide a boost to research and innovation. Tier 2 facilities fill a gap where computational needs have not been met by local or national machines. Professor Mark Spearing, Vice President for Research and Enterprise at the University, emphasised that:
“The University uses High Performance and Data Intensive Computing to develop new medicines, design new airplanes, and understand social science, fundamental physics and molecular scale chemistry in partnership with industry. This resource will accelerate the work of our scientists and engineers.”
The SES Consortium is pleased to announce the development of three facilities:
- Peta, (led by the University of Cambridge), a multi-disciplinary facility providing large-scale data simulation and high performance data analytics and projected to become one of the largest HPC facilities in the UK;
- The Materials and Molecular Modelling Hub (led by University College London) or Materials and Molecular Modelling Hub;
- JADE, the Joint Academic Data Science Endeavour (led by the University of Oxford).
SES members King’s College London, Imperial College London, and the University of Southampton have collectively contributed to all three of the new facilities, alongside various institutions throughout major cities and regions of the UK who, similarly, have identified the need for such a scale and range of new HPC facilities. Click here to read the full story. 