Faster on Falcon

One of the projects to benefit from the forthcoming upgrade of Cardiff’s Supercomputing Facility is FASTER (Flexible Ammonia Synthesis Technology for Energy StoRage), an EU project to develop an innovative and sustainable method for storing green energy.

Researchers from the Net Zero Innovation Institute are part of FASTER, a collaborative venture between leading European universities and industries, launched in January 2025, which will develop sustainable energy storage as green ammonia to create a cleaner future and strengthen Europe's energy security.

FASTER focuses on converting solar and wind energy into ammonia, which is easily stored and transported and has an established infrastructure due to its use in agriculture. Green ammonia has huge potential to reduce carbon emissions and create efficient, cleaner energy production. This is crucial for addressing seasonal fluctuations in renewable energy production and consumption.

The project consists of eight partners from five countries, including the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and the United Kingdom. It brings together experts in catalysis from Cardiff University with international experts in green energy technology.

Dr Alberto Roldan Martinez, Reader in Catalytic & Computational Chemistry, is the Catalysis Theme Leader at the Net Zero Innovation Institute. A long-time user of the ARCCA facilities, Dr. Roldan is conducting research to better understand the surface processes that influence heterogeneous catalysis phenomena, processes that are closely related to environmental remediation and clean energy. To achieve this, his team is using various computational tools to simulate the physical and chemical properties of systems, as well as the reaction mechanisms.

With the ageing Hawk system becoming less competitive and difficult to support, ARCCA plans to retire most of the supercomputing infrastructure this year. Hawk will be replaced by “Falcon”, which will commence full production in late April to early May. More on this will follow in a subsequent news article, but we note that Falcon will feature around 7,300 AMD cores, 4 x Nvidia H100 GPUs and 8 x L40S GPUs, and enhanced storage facilities and networking. Dr. Roldan said, “Our work using Hawk has already enabled significant developments in understanding catalytic processes of importance to the chemical industry. Falcon will take our research to the next level, providing an invaluable resource in delivering on the aspirations of FASTER”.