HPC Wales boosted by £2m European funding

At an event highlighting the impact of research enabled by High Performance Computing (HPC) in Wales, data experts, technology suppliers and policymakers gathered at the University of Cardiff’s new Abacws building, heard Economy Minister Vaughan Gething MS announce the provision of a further European Regional Development Fund of £2m to support HPC facilities and software engineering teams across all four Supercomputing Wales (SCW) universities: Cardiff, Swansea, Aberystwyth and Bangor. Available through the Welsh Government this has brought the total funding to £11.9M for the period 2015-2022, with University partner investment topping up the programme value to £19.6M.

Minister Gething said: “Research, science, and technology has never been more important in tackling the major global problems of our time. A perfect example of this is Supercomputing’s invaluable work during the global pandemic in modelling the spread of COVID-19 in Wales and sequencing COVID-19 genomes. Supercomputing Wales is more than just computing infrastructure – it is an important community of research software engineers, technical staff and researchers working to achieve substantial outcomes for science, our universities and for Wales.

“High Performance Computing and software engineering will play a vital role in both academic and industrial research over the course of the next decade. The Welsh Government is proud to support Supercomputing Wales in its quest to build research expertise in data gathering and analysis. This will benefit the economy, public services, education and health care, helping improve our future well-being and tackle some of the major global problems of our time.”

Professor Roger Whitaker, Academic Director of Supercomputing Wales and Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research, Innovation and Enterprise at Cardiff University, said: “We were delighted to welcome a diverse range of delegates and speakers to our showcase, including Economy Minister Vaughan Gething. Large-scale data is now abundant, and the event set out to celebrate the role of HPC and software engineering in helping to process, analyse and understand data that shapes innovation landscape in Wales, the UK and beyond.”

Guest speakers also included Professor Mark Wilkinson, Director of DiRAC which provides distributed HPC services to the Science and Technology Facilities Council theory community. Mike Gravenor, Professor of Biostatistics and Epidemiology at Swansea University’s Institute of Life Science and Dr Anna Price, a Research Software Engineer in Cardiff’s School of Biosciences focused on the role played by Supercomputing Wales in data analysis to tackle the Covid-19 pandemic.

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