Computational Science

…processing power and inspiring insights

It’s the age of data. But how can data’s value be maximised to aid research and innovation in fields ranging from energy to engineering, from particle physics to the life sciences? And what will the computing landscape of tomorrow actually look like?

We provide organisations in academia and industry with world-class expertise and support in computational science. Specifically, we enable all types of organisation to develop software, tame data mountains, discern patterns in complex datasets and harness computing to improve prediction and forecasting:

• Our Scientific Computing Department provides academia and industry with large-scale high performance computing (HPC) facilities, as well as computing data services and infrastructure. The Department includes world-leading experts in computational chemistry, computational engineering, software engineering, petascale storage and many other disciplines.
• The DiRAC (Distributed Research utilising Advanced Computing) facility provides the particle physics, nuclear physics, astronomy and cosmology research communities with access to HPC and theoretical modelling technologies that can tackle the most intractable of research challenges.
• The Hartree Centre offers industry access to world-class HPC capabilities and complementary software skills. For example, the Centre is home to Blue Joule, the UK’s number-one supercomputer and the largest in the world dedicated to software development, capable of completing a thousand trillion calculations a second.
• GridPP (a Grid for Particle Physics) provides data processing, data modelling and data analysis services as part of a global network for the Large Hadron Collider, as part of the LHC Computing Grid and European Grid. We also host one of the Tier 1 supercomputers that make it all possible.

Complementing these core capabilities:

• We host CEDA (Centre for Environmental Data Archival), a joint initiative with NERC supporting researchers in environmental science, furthering archival practices in the field of environmental data and developing new technologies that can improve access to data.
• We host the UKSSDC (the UK Solar System Data Centre) which harnesses grid computing technologies to facilitate access to national and international datasets for the UK’s solar system science community.

Through all these mechanisms, we complement the contribution made by the other Research Councils driving innovation and achievement in the vital sphere of computational science and leading-edge computing.