We’re celebrating the launch of a new £3.8m supercomputer and our role in improving diversity and opportunity for women in High Performance Computing.
Durham is proud to host Bede, the N8 Centre of Excellence in Computationally Intensive Research (N8 CIR) high-performance computing platform.
Launched last year, the supercomputer is being used to better understand Covid-19 and how to recover from the pandemic, while also playing a key role in areas like Artificial Intelligence (AI), energy storage and therapeutic drug design.
We’re also delighted to be playing a key role in improving diversity and opportunity for women in High Performance Computing.
We’re a member of the N8 Centre of Excellence in Computationally Intensive Research (N8 CIR), which has been recognised as a chapter of the Women in High Performance Computing (WHPC) organisation.
The new WHPC chapter is committed to addressing the issue of gender balance within the N8 CIR, improving the gender balance at workshops by identifying barriers that women face when applying for places, identifying and challenging reasons why there are so few women in senior roles in HPC and raising the profile of people from underrepresented groups.
These two milestones were celebrated at the N8 Research Partnership’s Computationally Intensive Research Community Day hosted by Durham.
The event also marked the launch of the N8 CIR’s new machine learning research theme.
Speakers included Durham’s Dr Marion Weinzierl and Dr Mariann Hardey who co-founded the N8 WHPC chapter, as well as our Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Research), Professor Colin Bain, and Dr Alan Real, Director of Advanced Research Computing at Durham and the N8 CIR Technical Director.
Bede adds to Durham’s growing hub of High Performance Computing (HPC) technology, which includes being hosts to the Science and Technology Facilities Council DiRAC Memory Intensive Supercomputer (COSMA), used across particle physics, cosmology, astronomy and nuclear physics programmes.
We’ve also invested £1.2m in Hamilton 8, a CPU-based HPC to support research across all four of our Faculties.
And we’re working hard to increase diversity in computer science, including setting up the Durham University Women in Tech society, while also running Computer Science for Girls to help female GCSE and A-level students discover computer science.
Learn more about the N8 Research Partnership and the N8 Research Partnership’s Computationally Intensive Research Community Day.
Discover more about the Bede supercomputer.
See more about how we’re supporting Women in High Performance Computing.
Advanced Research Computing at Durham.
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