New £3.8m supercomputer in County Durham will help in the fight against coronavirus

The Bede supercomputer, which has been installed at Durham Univeristy will support projects in areas such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), energy storage and supply and therapeutic drug design.

Its technology is already being used in research to better understand Covid-19 and how to recover from the pandemic.

The new £3.8m N8 Bede Supercomputer, hosted by Durham University, will boost research and discovery across the north of England Pictures: Durham University

The N8 Research Partnership of northern England’s research intensive universities, which includes Durham, Newcastle and York, has made the Bede available to accelerate research and development projects.

Bede links the highest capability national and international supercomputers with local computers at individual research institutions.

It allows researchers to tackle larger problems than has previously been possible in the north of England and can also be accessed by researchers outside of the N8 partnership.

Bede adds to Durham University’s growing hub of High Performance Computing (HPC) technology, which includes the COSMA supercomputer, part of the UK’s DiRAC HPC facility, used across particle physics, cosmology, astronomy and nuclear physics programmes.

Bede adds to Durham University’s strength as a hub for supercomputer technology

Durham is also investing £1.2m in the Hamilton 8 supercomputer, which will be commissioned later this year, to support research across all four of the University’s Faculties.

Professor Colin Bain, Vice-Provost (Research), at Durham, said: “Durham has real strengths in High Performance Computing and we’re proud to add Bede to this hub and to host this facility on behalf of our partners in the N8.

“Bede will help researchers from across the UK and the wider world to tackle immediate issues like Covid-19, while supporting advances in the technologies of the future.”

Bede’s capability matches that of leading supercomputers around the world, but on a smaller scale.

Professor Colin Bain, Vice-Provost (Research) at Durham University, said Bede will help researchers tackle Covid-19 and support advances in future technologies

Dr Alan Real, technical director of the N8 Centre of Excellence in Computational Intensive Research and Director of Advanced Research Computing at Durham University, said: “Bede enables us to deal with data at a scale that other machines can’t. It’s not just far faster, it enables us to tackle problems that were simply beyond our capabilities before.”

Bede has been funded by £3.1m from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, with N8 partner universities contributing.

Dr Annette Bramley, director of the N8 Research Partnership, said: “The launch of Bede marks a significant milestone for the research and academic communities across the North and indeed the wider UK and beyond. It will help researchers undertake work that incorporates experimental activities underpinned by large data or modelling situations which are unable to be replicated in standard experiments.

The new £3.8m N8 Bede Supercomputer, hosted by Durham University, will boost research and discovery

“This means the Northern Powerhouse is well placed to be the home of pivotal breakthroughs that will be at the cutting edge of what science and technology can currently achieve. In addition, the use of the facility will enable our researchers to undertake work that will address issues relating to the Covid-19 pandemic, including how our region can be the driving force behind a green recovery.”