Welsh Government Funding Extension for Supercomputing Wales

It was announced at the recent Supercomputing Wales (SCW) conference held in Cardiff earlier this month, that SCW have been awarded additional funding from Welsh Government to extend the successful SCW project comprising of the four Welsh partnership universities Cardiff, Swansea, Bangor and Aberystwyth.

Part-funded since 2015 by the European Regional Development Fund through Welsh Government, Supercomputing Wales two high-performance computing hubs, based in Cardiff University and Swansea University have supported computational research ranging from modelling the spread of COVID-19 to mapping and monitoring land cover across Wales using satellite imagery. Since the initial award, the project has benefitted from two additional funding extensions from Welsh Government with the latest ensuring £19.6M over the past 7 years, of which £11.9M has been WEFO funded with the rest contributed by the universities.

The recent conference entitled “The Power and Future of Supercomputing in Wales”, provided a showcase and celebration of the impact of SCW high performance computing (HPC) and research software engineering which has been at the heart of advanced research and innovation in Wales.  Guest speakers included Welsh Government Minister for Economy, Vaughan Gething MS, and Professor Mark Wilkinson, Director of DiRAC HPC Facility, with attendees from government departments, researchers’ funders, and researchers whose works have benefitted from HPC and research software engineering.

The additional funding will be used to enable Systems Engineers and Research Software Engineers to continue until the end of this year to support researchers based at Aberystwyth, Bangor, Cardiff and Swansea universities to analyse, simulate and solve some of the world’s most important scientific challenges. Furthermore, funds will help to ensure new maintenance and support contracts that will extend the lifespan of the current HPC systems hosted at Cardiff and Swansea.