£20m for six tier-2 UK supercomputer centres
- Author:Ella Cai
- Release on:2017-03-28
Six high-performance computing centres for academics and industry will be launched officially on Thursday.
Funded with £20m from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) the centres are located at the universities of Cambridge, Edinburgh, Exeter, and Oxford, Loughborough University, and UCL.
“These centres will enable new discoveries, drive innovation and allow new insights into today’s scientific challenges, ” said EPSRC CEO Professor Philip Nelson. “They are important because they address an existing gulf in capability between local university systems and the UK National Supercomputing Service ARCHER. Many universities are involved in the six centres, and these will give more researchers easy access to high performance computing.”
Some of the centres will be available free of charge to any EPSRC-supported researcher, and some will give access to UK industry.
The different types of computing requirements provided by this Tier-2 group include high-throughput and GPU computing: JADE system at the University of Oxford will be the largest GPU facility in the UK. GW4 centre will be a world-leading ARM-based test-bed.
The launch ceremony will be at the Thinktank science museum in Birmingham.
Isambard HPC UofBristolThe six grants are:
GW4 Tier-2 HPC Centre for Advanced Architectures
£3m for ‘Isambard’ will use ARM processors
Universities of Bristol, Bath, Cardiff and Exeter, Cray, Met Office
Peta-5: National Facility for Petascale Data Intensive Computation and Analytics
£5m for a multi-disciplinary facility will provide large-scale data simulation and high performance data analytics designed to enable advances in material science, computational chemistry, computational engineering and health informatics.
Universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Southampton, Leicester and Bristol, UCL, Imperial College London, DiRAC, King’s College London, The Alan Turing Institute
Tier-2 Hub in materials and molecular modelling (MMM)
£4m for Thomas (after Thomas Young), available to members of the materials and molecular modelling hub as well as the wider MMM and Tier-2 communities. Applications in energy, healthcare and the environment.
UCL, Imperial College London, King’s College London, Queen Mary University of London, Queen’s University of Belfast, Universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Kent and Southampton, OCF
JADE: Joint Academic Data science Endeavour
Largest GPU facility in the UK (nodes have eight Nvidia Tesla P100 GPUs coupled through NVlink,
£3m for JADE will focus on machine learning and related data science areas, and molecular dynamics.
It will have applications in areas such as natural language understanding, autonomous intelligent machines, medical imaging and drug design.
Universities of Oxford, Edinburgh, Southampton, Sheffield and Bristol, Queen Mary University of London, UCL and King’s College London, NVIDIA
HPC Midlands Plus
£3.2m for HPC at a new centre of excellence at Loughborough University’s Science and Enterprise Park.
It will be used by universities, research organisations and businesses to undertake complex simulations and process vast quantities in fields ranging from engineering, manufacturing, healthcare and energy.
Loughborough University, Aston University, Universities of Birmingham, Leicester, Nottingham and Warwick, Queen Mary University of London
EPCC Tier-2 HPC Service
£2.4m for Cirrus at the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC), which will provide a state-of-the-art multi-core HPC service for science and industry.
With a next-generation research data store dedicated to Tier-2 users, it is being installed to allow researchers to store data, share it and move it between different supercomputers.
Universities of Edinburgh, Bristol, Leeds and Strathclyde, UCL
Funded with £20m from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) the centres are located at the universities of Cambridge, Edinburgh, Exeter, and Oxford, Loughborough University, and UCL.
“These centres will enable new discoveries, drive innovation and allow new insights into today’s scientific challenges, ” said EPSRC CEO Professor Philip Nelson. “They are important because they address an existing gulf in capability between local university systems and the UK National Supercomputing Service ARCHER. Many universities are involved in the six centres, and these will give more researchers easy access to high performance computing.”
Some of the centres will be available free of charge to any EPSRC-supported researcher, and some will give access to UK industry.
The different types of computing requirements provided by this Tier-2 group include high-throughput and GPU computing: JADE system at the University of Oxford will be the largest GPU facility in the UK. GW4 centre will be a world-leading ARM-based test-bed.
The launch ceremony will be at the Thinktank science museum in Birmingham.
Isambard HPC UofBristolThe six grants are:
GW4 Tier-2 HPC Centre for Advanced Architectures
£3m for ‘Isambard’ will use ARM processors
Universities of Bristol, Bath, Cardiff and Exeter, Cray, Met Office
Peta-5: National Facility for Petascale Data Intensive Computation and Analytics
£5m for a multi-disciplinary facility will provide large-scale data simulation and high performance data analytics designed to enable advances in material science, computational chemistry, computational engineering and health informatics.
Universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Southampton, Leicester and Bristol, UCL, Imperial College London, DiRAC, King’s College London, The Alan Turing Institute
Tier-2 Hub in materials and molecular modelling (MMM)
£4m for Thomas (after Thomas Young), available to members of the materials and molecular modelling hub as well as the wider MMM and Tier-2 communities. Applications in energy, healthcare and the environment.
UCL, Imperial College London, King’s College London, Queen Mary University of London, Queen’s University of Belfast, Universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Kent and Southampton, OCF
JADE: Joint Academic Data science Endeavour
Largest GPU facility in the UK (nodes have eight Nvidia Tesla P100 GPUs coupled through NVlink,
£3m for JADE will focus on machine learning and related data science areas, and molecular dynamics.
It will have applications in areas such as natural language understanding, autonomous intelligent machines, medical imaging and drug design.
Universities of Oxford, Edinburgh, Southampton, Sheffield and Bristol, Queen Mary University of London, UCL and King’s College London, NVIDIA
HPC Midlands Plus
£3.2m for HPC at a new centre of excellence at Loughborough University’s Science and Enterprise Park.
It will be used by universities, research organisations and businesses to undertake complex simulations and process vast quantities in fields ranging from engineering, manufacturing, healthcare and energy.
Loughborough University, Aston University, Universities of Birmingham, Leicester, Nottingham and Warwick, Queen Mary University of London
EPCC Tier-2 HPC Service
£2.4m for Cirrus at the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC), which will provide a state-of-the-art multi-core HPC service for science and industry.
With a next-generation research data store dedicated to Tier-2 users, it is being installed to allow researchers to store data, share it and move it between different supercomputers.
Universities of Edinburgh, Bristol, Leeds and Strathclyde, UCL
