Supercomputing facilities are often used to computationally analyse extremely large data sets through software to reveal patterns, trends, and associations, especially relating to human behaviour and interactions.

There is a library of technical documentation including guides, how-tos and full guidance on the use of the Supercomputing Wales systems available on the User Portal.

Members of staff undertaking research activities at one of the Supercomputing Wales consortium partners – Cardiff, Swansea, Bangor and Aberystwyth universities – can apply for a Supercomputing Wales account. Please see the ‘Getting Access’ section of the User Portal.

Whilst a desktop PC typically features 4 processing cores, supercomputers contain thousands of cores. Supercomputers are used for scientific and engineering problems where a very high rate of calculation or simulation is required.

The supercomputing hubs were upgraded during 2018 with a total of 13,080 processing cores, connected to high speed memory and storage, delivering 1 Petaflop of computing power. This is equivalent to one thousand million million (10¹⁵) floating-point operations per second.

The Supercomputing Wales facilities are used by research groups at the consortium universities – Cardiff, Swansea, Bangor and Aberystwyth – along with companies and other partners working on collaborative projects.

You can submit a support ticket to the technical team via the ‘Submit Support Ticket’ page of the User Portal.