New multi-million pound national supercomputer for Leicester

The new HPC facility for Theoretical Astrophysics and Particle Physics is one of four systems available to researchers across the UK. Along with the other three, hosted at Cambridge, Durham and Edinburgh, they aim to provide important new insights into the origins of galaxies, stars, black holes and dark matter. The University has won £2 million in capital funding to host this HPC service, which is part of the £19 million for specialist supercomputers announced recently, and enhances the DiRAC facility.

This new HPC service should have a peak theoretical performance of 100Tflop/s (that’s 100,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second) which is about five times that of ALICE, along with more than 1PB (petabyte) of storage.

Dr Chris Rudge, head of the Research Computing Services team at the University of Leicester who will manage the new facility said “This is a terrific opportunity for Leicester. It confirms our reputation as a major national provider of HPC for scientific research, and it enables us to showcase our cutting-edge technological solutions that minimise the environmental impact of large-scale computing facilities.”

Director of IT Services, Mary Visser commented that “This exciting development thoroughly complements our new institutional IT Strategy which aims to ensure that our world-leading researchers have the computing infrastructure they require.”