UCL to host £19.5m national supercomputing facility as UK expands research compute capacity

New high-performance system will support 37,000+ CPU cores and open access to researchers and undergraduates nationwide.

University College London will host a £19.5 million National Compute Resource designed to expand high-performance computing access for researchers across the UK, as part of a wider government-backed strategy to strengthen digital research infrastructure.

The system, called Charger, will run on more than 37,000 central processing unit cores and support research ranging from climate modeling and engineering simulations to biosciences and large-scale digital humanities analysis. Funding comes from UK Research and Innovation as part of four new National Compute Resources aligned with the UK Compute Roadmap launched in July 2025.

Charger is expected to be fully operational later this year.

Broad access beyond specialist supercomputing

While high-performance computing has traditionally served specialist technical fields, Charger is intended to support a wider research base, including smaller-scale, high-volume workloads.

Dr Owain Kenway of UCL Advanced Research Computing says: “Charger boosts the UK’s capability to do real computational research across a wide variety of fields (including but not limited to the physical sciences, biosciences, social sciences and humanities) and puts compute power in the hands of researchers who might otherwise be denied access to larger resources because of the way their problems are structured (many small tasks rather than one large one)."

He adds: “As part of this service, we are also committed to putting part of the system into the hands of undergraduate students on courses around the country. This will give them invaluable experience learning how to use real, national scale high performance computer systems and preparing them for a world where research increasingly relies on computers for large scale simulation and data analysis.”

Professor James Hetherington, Director of UCL Advanced Research Computing, says: “UCL Advanced Research Computing is delighted to have been selected as a host of the National Compute Resource. We're a hybrid of a professional information technology service and a research centre, and we look forward both to delivering reliably for the UK and to discovering and sharing new things about how we best use computers to do science.”

Infrastructure, sustainability, and national strategy

The system will run on Hewlett Packard Enterprise technology, including HPE Slingshot networking and HPE Cray storage, and will be hosted by DataVita in Scotland.

Hosting in Scotland rather than London is expected to reduce emissions by approximately 465 tonnes of CO₂e per year due to Scotland’s lower carbon intensity electricity supply and cooler climate, which enables year-round free air cooling.

Danny Quinn, Managing Director of DataVita, says: “We want to thank UCL for choosing to partner with DataVita and by combining the research excellence and innovation leadership of leading London institutions with the environmental and cost advantages of hosting in Scotland, this approach brings together world-class compute capability with measurable sustainability benefits. Our recent designation as an AI Growth Zone further demonstrates our infrastructure readiness, market credibility and strategic importance within the UK’s sovereign AI and HPC landscape, reinforcing why Scotland and DataVita represent the most efficient and future-proof location for high-performance AI and supercomputing workloads.”

Richard Gunn, Digital Research Infrastructure Programme Director at UKRI, says: "With the £19.4 million award to UCL, UKRI is significantly expanding the capacity of our national network to handle a huge range of research tasks. This system is designed to be a versatile and reliable resource for a vast array of use cases, from life sciences, humanities, to engineering.

“Our goal in funding this facility is to ensure that the UK’s research community has the 'digital horsepower' required to solve complex challenges and maintain our global edge in innovation."

Part of a wider compute expansion

Charger is one of four new National Compute Resources, alongside systems led by the universities of Edinburgh, Birmingham, and Cambridge. The funding covers both hardware and five years of expert support through 2031.

By investing in multiple systems with distinct hardware profiles, UKRI aims to provide diverse compute capabilities, simplified access pathways, and sustained technical support. These new resources will operate alongside existing UK AI and supercomputing services, expanding capacity at a time when research increasingly depends on large-scale simulation, data analysis, and AI-driven modeling.

For higher education institutions, the inclusion of undergraduate access signals a shift: national-scale computing is no longer confined to elite research groups. The test will be how effectively institutions integrate this capacity into teaching, skills development, and interdisciplinary research once the system goes live later this year.

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