The University of Bristol (www.bristol.ac.uk) is one of the key academic partners in a new collaboration announced by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) to accelerate the adoption of super-computers in the UK.

Led by HPE (www.hpe.com) with ARM, SUSE and the universities of Bristol, Edinburgh and Leicester, the Catalyst UK project will see the development and use of one of the largest ARM-based super-computing installations world-wide.

It will enable industry and academics to build new applications that use vast amounts of data, as set out in the Government’s Industrial Strategy (launched last year).

The super-computerinstallations will be spread across the three universities this summer, and the project will run for three years.

The key focus of the Catalyst UK programme is to investigate and showcase the potential of ARM-based supercomputing.

This is one of the current approaches to overcome the limitations of traditional computer architectures and offer
a better price-performance ratio for modern workloads and applications.

This includes artificial intelligence, which involves processing large amounts of data and requires extremely high memory bandwidth, and ‘exascale’ computing, which requires HPC (high-performance computing) systems to be hundreds of times faster and more efficient than today’s fastest super-computers.

HPE vice-president Mike Vildibill said: “We are currently seeing an insatiable demand for computer performance, as companies seek to gain intelligent and actionable insights from their data.

"As we embark on the global race towards more powerful and eventually exascale systems, new approaches and technologies are needed to tackle some of the key challenges in achieving these levels of performance.”