Four UK universities launch £3.5m supercomputing hub

Hub aimed at driving economic growth in the Midlands and London

UK universities have invested in a £3.5m supercomputing hub that should help to promote economic growth in the Midlands and London.

The University of Warwick, University of Birmingham, University of Nottingham and Queen Mary, University of London have invested a total of £1.5m in the high-performance computing centre dubbed MidPlus to provide SMEs and larger firms with modelling, simulation and analysis services.

A further £2m has been invested by research funding agency the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

Director of MidPlus, professor Mark Rodger, told Computing that the EPSRC is keen for the facility to both "help the research base of the country and provide capacity so that UK plc should be able to get access to these facilities as well".

MidPlus hopes to provide extra computing capacity to sectors such as aerospace, automotive, biomedical and advanced materials in addition to providing its expertise to the local workforce.

Rodger believes there are many situations in which a supercomputing hub could prove useful to a business.

"For example, it could be used for designing engineering equipment, or online shops who want to have algorithms behind their internet sales processes which are able to match what the business wants to do with what its customers are looking for.

"These applications require a lot of effort to interrogate databases and optimise their methods. To do that effectively there is a lot of computation. On a low level it could be done in a small cluster or a simple desktop machine, which can be afforded fairly easily. But if it is a bigger job or if a business's sales base grows, then it may find that it is limited in its ability to respond.

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Four UK universities launch £3.5m supercomputing hub

Hub aimed at driving economic growth in the Midlands and London

"It is in a situation like this where a business can use bigger, faster resources to increase their capabilities and competitiveness," he said.

Rodger said that MidPlus aims to help both SMEs and larger businesses.

"For a business, it could be that rather than investing in their own kit they use our services. Alternatively, they could have their own equipment but every once in a while they have spikes in demand and rather than investing in more kit that sits idle for the majority of time, they could just buy access to [MidPlus].

"It may be that they don't realise how much they can do with [MidPlus], so they want to work closely at the research base with the four universities to discover what could be done in their industry and get trained so that they could begin to do it themselves rather than continuing to subcontract to universities," he suggested.

Rodger, however, conceded that MidPlus's service offering might not suit everyone.

"With SMEs it is clearly a situation where investment in rented infrastructure is not really something that they can afford to do unless it's really pertinent and essential to their core business, but it's the kind of thing that occasional access to may greatly enhance their capabilities.

"With larger companies there is an economic argument there to consider. It costs money to maintain facilities in terms of system management and operations, for example. If the company has many subgroups then they might have already invested into the computational side but if they have not then there are advantages there for them [with MidPlus]," he argued.

One company that MidPlus does have support from is Jaguar Land Rover, which Rodger said uses the hub for its research expertise.

MidPlus will now significantly extend the current computing power available within the region's universities by the end of the summer.

For example, the University of Warwick said it will increase its current capacity to give a 6,000 core cluster by the summer to enable it to deal with large, realistic simulations quickly and efficiently. The upgrade to its existing server and storage cluster was provided by data processing, management and storage provider OCF.

The new centre's facilities will be available to businesses along the M1/M6 corridor in the East and West Midlands and London.