Edinburgh University is to be the site of a new £79m national supercomputer that will be five times quicker than the UK’s current capabilities.
The new resource, housed at the university’s Advanced Computing Facility at Easter Bush, will be integral in aiding discoveries in medicine, climate science, and aerospace. It will also build on previous British breakthroughs in targeted treatments for arthritis and HIV.
The university will work with UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) to install the high performance computing service over the next year.
ARCHER2 is part of a £200m investment by the Treasury, which was at the core of its Spring Statement. Ensuring the UK is at the forefront of science and technology innovation was featured in the Spring statement by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond.
The new supercomputer replaces the £43m ARCHER (Academic Research Computing High End Resource) system, which is capable of more than one million billion calculations a second.
“ARCHER2 will provide UK science with an unparalleled capability to model and simulate the world around us,” said Professor Mark Parsons, EPCC Director.
“This is a real vote of confidence in the University’s supercomputing centre, EPCC, which is internationally recognised for its excellence in computational science.”
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