ARCHER2 to provide World Leading Support to UK R&D

During a visit to Scotland Prime Minister Boris Johnson discovered first-hand how ARCHER2, the UK’s newest and most powerful supercomputer could facilitate at least 11 times more science throughput than its predecessor, ARCHER.

Speaking from the University of Edinburgh’s EPCC, the UK’s leading centre of Supercomputing and Data Science Expertise, Mr Johnson commented: “It was great to witness the front-line work of UK supercomputing science right here in Edinburgh, including seeing the real horsepower behind mapping climate change, driving discovery in engineering and researching the effects of anti-bodies, in person.

“Scotland is rightly benefiting from our £79 million investment, placing it front and centre of research and development, while boosting, spreading and levelling up opportunities across the UK.”

Funded by UKRI through the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), ARCHER2’s peak performance equals around 250,000 modern laptop computers all working together, or a speed 10 billion times faster than that of the first Cray supercomputer in 1964. Following a phased commissioning process the full 23 cabinet system is now online.

EPSRC Executive Chair Dame Lynn Gladden said: “ARCHER2 is an exciting and important component of the UK’s research and innovation system, providing world-leading computing capabilities to deliver the UK’s fastest research computing for both our university-based researchers and their business partners."

NERC Executive Chair, Professor Sir Duncan Wingham added: “High-performance computing underpins a wide range of significant research and innovation across environmental science, from modelling the effects of climate change to calculating the properties of the Earth’s core. ARCHER2 will greatly increase the computational capacity we have at our disposal and will play an important role in supporting new scientific discoveries and innovations."

EPCC Director, Professor Mark Parsons, said: “ARCHER2 represents a world-class supercomputing resource for the UK’s high performance computing researchers and EPCC is delighted to be continuing to support them. It has taken a huge collaborative effort between EPCC, HPE Cray and UKRI to get to this point. We are very pleased that ARCHER2 is now delivering its full potential for innovative computational science in the UK."

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