Midlands universitybased high performance computing centre receives 32 million
Funding of £3.2million has been received by the Midlands Innovation group of universities, including the University of Leicester, and Queen Mary University of London to establish a centre of excellence in high performance computing (HPC).
High performance computing is used to undertake complex simulations, to find solutions for challenging problems and to process vast quantities of data. It has the potential to act as a catalyst for breakthroughs across a wide range of sectors – from engineering, manufacturing and transport to finance, healthcare and energy.
HPC Midlands Plus, which will be based at Loughborough University Science and Enterprise Park, will harness the seven universities’ collective expertise in high performance computing to drive forward research and innovation in this growing area.
It will feature a 14,336 core supercomputer with 65 TB RAM, high-speed Infiniband interconnect and a 1 PB file store supplied by ClusterVision and Huawei. It will also contain a large memory Power8 component for massive data processing with a dedicated high speed file store.
HPC Midlands Plus is due to be officially launched in the spring of this year. University of Leicester staff may obtain further information on HPC Midlands Plus usage and access policy from Dr Aldo Rona, HPC Midlands Plus academic contact point and HPC Midlands Plus management board Leicester representative, by emailing ar45@leicester.ac.uk