Foundation HPC-Skills Training Course
Foundation HPC-Skills Training Course Oct-Nov 2023 This course will cover the fundamental skills to enable you to use a DiRAC system. Including a version control system like Git, a workload manager like Slurm, and introducing concepts in software engineering. Objective The learner will be able to: Summary of work undertaken The course will run from […]
DiRAC’s Memory Intensive Service at Durham helps scientists produce the largest and most accurate virtual representation of the universe to date.

The SIBELIUS Project ran their constrained realisation simulation, “SIBELIUS-DARK”, over several weeks and produced over one Petabyte of data. This simulation recreates the formation of our current Universe out to 200 Mpc, starting from the Big Bang. It is a Dark-Matter-only simulation using a semi-analytic galaxy formation model, ‘Galform’. Individual massive galaxy clusters we see […]
Innovation Placements 2021
Current Opportunities
DiRAC-3 Systems
DiRAC has procured 3 new systems situated on our four sites. The new Extreme Scaling at Edinburgh, Data Intensive at Cambridge and Leicester, and Memory Intensive at Durham. Data Intensive System (DIaC,DIaL) This service is a general purpose system for codes that are neither CPU centric or Memory centric. This service is spread across two […]
£20m funding boost for science supercomputer will “drive science simulation and UK-wide innovation”

Please find he full UKRI press release here. The UK government has announced a £20m funding boost to upgrade the capabilities of the DiRAC High Performance Computing facility. The upgrade will enhance the UK’s scientific leadership and productivity, driving ground-breaking discoveries in scientific research, with opportunities spread across the UK. It will support the training […]
Durham University and DiRAC will deepen understanding of the universe with 2nd Gen AMD EPYC™ CPUs

Read the case study about how Durham University used AMD EPYC processors to enable much larger simulation data sets with faster execution to speed up the discovery process during cosmological investigations into the origins of the universe and the Big Bang.
Atos supercomputer to help unlock secrets of the Universe
Atos today announces it has been awarded a contract by the University of Edinburgh to deliver its supercomputer, the BullSequana XH2000, the most energy-efficient supercomputing system on the market. This is the largest system dedicated to GPU computing deployed at a customer site in the UK. The new system will constitute the Extreme Scaling Service of […]
Dark matter is slowing the spin of the Milky Way’s galactic bar

The spin of the Milky Way’s galactic bar, made up of billions of clustered stars, has slowed by about a quarter since its formation, according to a new study by UCL and University of Oxford scientists. The research, which made use of DiRAC’s CSD3 petascale HPC platform, analysed Gaia space telescope observations of a large […]
DiRAC Director discusses Catalyst UK on This Week in HPC Podcast

DiRAC Director, Professor Mark Wilkinson was part of a panel discussing what the Catalyst UK Project has achieved so far on the latest This Week in HPC Podcast with Addison Snell. You can listen to it here: https://soundcloud.com/this-week-in-hpc/episode-334-catalyst-uk-project-showcases-arm
The charming strangeness of the W boson
Theorists in the HPQCD collaboration have pinned down Vcs, a key parameter of the Standard Model, using STFC’s DiRAC Data Intensive supercomputer at Cambridge. Vcs is determined from combining the theoretical calculation with results from particle physics experiments around the world for the proportion of D mesons that decay to a K meson in a […]