The Science and Technology Facilities Council’s (STFC) Hartree Centre has launched a powerful new supercomputer designed to help UK industry accelerate innovation through artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced computing.
Located within STFC’s new £30 million Supercomputing Centre at its Daresbury Laboratory, the system is named in honour of Mary Coombs, the UK’s first female commercial programmer.
It will turn cutting-edge research into real-world solutions faster, more efficiently and at greater scale, boosting productivity and growth across the UK economy.
A leap in supercomputing processing power
Mary Coombs delivers 10 times the performance of its predecessor, Scafell Pike, while being more energy efficient. A 24.41 petaflop system, it can perform 24.41 quadrillion floating-point calculations per second. For context, carrying out one calculation per second would take nearly 773 million years to achieve the same number.
The GPU-based supercomputer is designed for AI workloads and advanced visualisation, marking a major step forward in the Hartree Centre’s computing capabilities.
Accelerating discovery
The Hartree Centre at STFC’s Daresbury Laboratory, at Sci-Tech Daresbury in the Liverpool City Region, is the UK’s only supercomputing centre dedicated to working with industry to advance digital innovation. Home to some of the UK’s leading experts in supercomputing, AI and data science, it helps businesses turn complex challenges and ideas into innovations that benefit the economy and society.
A key part of the UK’s digital innovation strategy
The new supercomputer forms part of the £210 million Hartree National Centre for Digital Innovation programme, a collaboration between STFC and IBM.
The programme helps UK businesses and public sector organisations explore and adopt advanced digital technologies such as AI, quantum computing and data analytics to boost productivity and growth.
The launch of the new STFC Supercomputing Centre also supports the government’s AI Opportunities Action Plan.
