In 2004 the Department of Physics & Astronomy and the MMC purchased high performance computing clusters with SRIF2 funding of £650,000. These systems are provided for scientific research purposes and are used by postgraduate students, postdoctoral researchers and academic staff.

The two clusters, known as spectrum (Physics & Astronomy) and newton (MMC) comprised the same hardware from Sun Microsystems but were different sizes. The spectrum cluster had 256 cpus across 64 compute nodes and newton had 160 cpu across 50 compute nodes. There have been some additions to both clusters increasing the total number of cpus to around 600.

In March 2009 all of the original hardware was replaced with new Dell hardware having a much smaller physical footprint and consuming much less electricity. Taking into account the reduction in energy for air conditioning as well as the computer equipment this hardware will have paid for itself, by reductions in the electricity bill, within a year of installation.

In November 2009 both clusters were combined into a single cluster with a new head node, ULARC, and an upgraded linux Operating System.

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