Supercomputer services to drive scientific breakthroughs

21 Feb 2020 03:27 PM

Cutting-edge supercomputing services announced recently (21 February 2020) will boost the UK’s ability to make scientific breakthroughs, such as designing better batteries and improving drug design.

With the backing of Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), £27 million will be distributed across seven High Performance Computing (HPC) centres.

The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) will be supporting one of the services by investing £3 million alongside the Medical Research Council, Health Data Research UK and UK Atomic Energy Authority (Culham Centre for Fusion Energy).

The JADE-2 service, hosted at STFC’s Hartree Centre, will be one of the seven benefiting centres. This new funding will give researchers invaluable access to powerful systems to support ground-breaking work in areas ranging from Artificial Intelligence (AI), energy storage and supply and therapeutic drug design.

Head of Service Operations at the Hartree Centre, Dave Cable recently said:

“We’re pleased to be supporting a wide range of scientific fields and industry sectors by hosting JADE-2 at the Hartree Centre. In addition to supporting Research Software Engineers across a wide range of applications, operating the JADE-2 service at the Hartree Centre will make a portion of this exciting system available to commercial businesses to further their industrial innovation.”

The funding announced will not only provide new advanced computing hardware across a wide range of industry sectors, but will support the development of research computing skills, including boosting the careers of Research Software Engineers across the UK.