About HPC UK

We bring together different not-for-profit organisations involved in HPC in the UK to provide information to users of HPC facilities.

HPC-UK provides information for users and providers on UK HPC facilities. This includes information on facilities available, how to gain access, what training courses are available and links to other useful resources.

What is HPC?

HPC (High-performance computing) is the use of many parallel computing elements (e.g. CPUs) to solve complex problems.

Applications that use HPC typically require high levels of floating point performance, large amounts of fast memory, the ability to communicate quickly between different processes, access to large amounts of fast disk storage, or any combination of the above.

HPC is used extensively in many different domains. Traditionally it has been particularly important in scientific research and engineering but more recently it has also become key to medical science and complex data analysis.

For a good introduction to the world of HPC, see the free Supercomputing course on Futurelearn.


Who are HPC-UK?

We are made up of a variety of organisations in the UK (see below).

If you want to get involved with HPC-UK the please contact us.

EPCC EPCC at The University of Edinburgh is one of the leading HPC centres in Europe with over 130 staff who are experts in a wide range of advanced computing. EPCC hosts a range of HPC and data facilties at its Advanced Computing Facility.

UK Research Software Engineers Association UK research relies on RSEs, so a campaign started by RSEs and the Software Sustainability Institute founded the UK RSE Association to bring together RSEs to share knowledge, provide support and help campaign for recognition in academia.

GW4 The GW4 Alliance brings together four of the most research-intensive and ambitious universities in the UK; the universities of Bath, Bristol, Cardiff and Exeter. The GW4 Alliance aims to: develop new knowledge with the capacity to change lives and society; deliver research capability at a globally competitive scale; foster new talent for the world stage; forge new and stronger relationships with commercial, non-profit, academic, healthcare and government organisations; drive economic growth through creation of a vibrant and integrated innovation ecosystem.

Cambridge Service for Data Driven Discovery (CSD3) is one of the EPSRC Tier-2 HPC facilities. CSD3 is a multi-institution service underpinned by an innovative, petascale, data-centric HPC platform, designed specifically to drive data-intensive simulation and high-performance data analysis.

HPC Midlands+ is a consortium on 7 universities: 6 in the midlands plus Queen Mary University in London; formed for the delivery of HPC to researchers in Higher Education Institutes in the Midlands, and beyond, to support excellent scientific and engineering research.

JADE (Joint Academic Data science Endeavour) A consortium of eight UK universities, led by the University of Oxford has established a new computing facility known as the Joint Academic Data science Endeavour (JADE). JADE has been designed for the needs of machine learning and related data science applications. There has been huge growth in machine learning in the last 5 years, and this is the first national facility to support this rapid development, with the university partners including the world-leading machine learning groups in Oxford, Edinburgh, KCL, QMUL, Sheffield and UCL.

MMM Hub (Materials and Molecular Modelling Hub) The theory and simulation of materials is one of the most thriving and vibrant areas of modern scientific research today. Designed specifically for the materials and molecular modelling community, this Tier 2 supercomputing facility is available to HPC users all over the UK. The MMM Hub was established in 2016 with a £4m EPSRC grant awarded to collaborators The Thomas Young Centre (TYC), and the Science and Engineering South Consortium (SES). The MMM Hub is led by University College London on behalf of the eight collaborative partners who sit within the TYC and SES: Imperial, King’s, QMUL, Oxford, Southampton, Kent, Belfast and Cambridge.

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