“Supercomputing Wales is a significant investment that represents a major step forward for Wales, contributing towards its’ competitiveness in science, engineering and innovation.”
Professor Roger Whitaker
Academic Director, Supercomputing Wales, Cardiff University
About Supercomputing Wales
Supercomputing Wales is a £16m programme of investment, part-funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) through the Welsh Government, to provide university research teams access to powerful computing facilities to undertake high-profile science and innovation projects within the consortium universities – Cardiff University, Swansea University, Bangor University and Aberystwyth University.
The programme includes investment in two upgraded supercomputer hubs and a new group of Research Software Engineers across Wales
to develop algorithms and customised software that harnesses the power of the facilities. The facilities are supported by an experienced and specialised technical support team providing wrap-around services. The aim of the investment is to capture more external research funding, increase scientific partnerships, create highly-skilled research jobs and support collaborations with industrial and other partners. This will provide a step change in supercomputing-enabled scientific research in Wales.
The Facilities
The supercomputer hubs are based at Cardiff and Swansea universities, with research teams across the consortium universities accessing the two hubs through high-speed network connections.
The 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.
