Research Computing Services

Government funding boost for Cambridge supercomputer •    £36 million investment to increase the AI Research Resource supercomputing capacity at Cambridge sixfold by spring 2026. •   More cutting-edge AI chips

We are thrilled to share that the University of Cambridge has secured a major £36 million government investment to expand our Dawn AI Research Resource supercomputer — increasing its capacity sixfold by spring 2026.

👉 bit.ly/4qZif9j

At this Thursday's Cambridge RSE Seminar, Matt Graham from @ucl-arc.bsky.social will be speaking to us about 'Automatic differentiation – an RSE's eye view'.

This Thursday 20 November at 1pm. West Hub, and on Zoom.

rse.group.cam.ac.uk/seminars

Previous talks here: www.youtube.com/@CambridgeRSE

Please visit us later this week at the UK Universities booth to learn more about our research and activities.

Isambard-AI and Dawn AIRR supercomputers: Innovator route Apply for up to 150,000 graphics processing unit hours on the Isambard-AI and Dawn supercomputers for artificial intelligence (AI) related research and development projects.

The latest AIRR (Dawn and Isambard AI) access opportunity is now open: bit.ly/4peyFJm

This call supports much larger projects than the existing routes, offering up to 150,000 GPU hours over six months. A great opportunity for ambitious AI and compute-intensive research teams to scale their work.

At this Thursday's Cambridge Research Software Engineering talk, our own Astrid Scott-Bennett (RCS, University of Cambridge) will speak on 'CSD3: An Introduction to Data Centre Operations at Cambridge'.

Thursday 13th November at 1pm in Room C, West Hub and on Zoom.

rse.group.cam.ac.uk/seminars

At this Thursday's Cambridge RSE talk, we’re delighted to welcome @oscarseip.bsky.social from the @softwaresaved.bsky.social (SSI) who will speak on: 'Communities, Capabilities, and Collaboration: How the SSI Supports Digital Research in the Arts and Humanities'

rse.group.cam.ac.uk/seminars

At this Thursday's Cambridge RSE talk, we’re delighted to welcome Oscar Seip from the Software Sustainability Institute (SSI) who will speak on: 'Communities, Capabilities, and Collaboration: How the SSI Supports Digital Research in the Arts and Humanities'

rse.group.cam.ac.uk/seminars

Highlights from the HPC-SIG Hartree Meeting!
Gwen Dawes chaired a panel on “Federated Access Management for UK DRIs,” part of the NFCS Network+ MyAccessID project.
Chris Edsall & Deepak Aggarwal led an AI Container workshop with talks by Frederic Brochu-Williams & Adam Walford.
#HPC #AI #MyAccessID

Our Cambridge Research Software Engineering seminars kick off this week. On Thursday, David Stansby (UCL Engineering) will speak about "Chunked file formats for massive imaging datasets".

Thursday 9th October at 1pm in Room E, West Hub, and on Zoom. All welcome!

rse.group.cam.ac.uk/seminars

Tom Meltzer presenting

Joe Wallwork presenting

At Cross VISS, our Institute of Computing for Climate Science colleagues shone: Tom Meltzer on LLM-assisted debugging & Joe Wallwork, Surbhi Goel & Loïc Lannelongue on Green Software Engineering. 🌍💻

Our security team’s Wojciech Turek & Adrian Ramsingh joined the UK Trusted Research Environment Conference — 3 days of insights, discussions & networking. Learnings will help us strengthen secure, collaborative research.

Network Plus conference panel

RCS’s Deepak Aggarwal & Frederic Brochu-Williams shared updates on MyAccessID governance & a federated AI container platform at the NFCS–NetworkPlus conference this week. Great discussions & feedback—next steps will shape the NFCS roadmap.N

AIRR booth at RSE conference 2025

Matt Williams from Bristol Centre for Supercomputing giving the AIRR Gold Sponsorship talk.

RCS research software engineer Miren Radia facilitating the Dawn workshop at RSE conference 2025.

Research software engineer Joe Wallwork presenting his work for the Institute of Computing for Climate Science at RSE conference 2025.

The RCS team had a fantastic week at #RSECon25! 🎉

We were proud to be joint Gold Sponsors with BriCS as part of the UK AI Research Resource (AIRR)—sharing in a talk and running a workshop on Dawn.

Highlights included talks from Marion Weinzierl and Joe Wallwork, plus our new Dawn lion mascots 🦁

It's a privilege to be one of this year's Gold Sponsors of #rsecon25!

UK's most powerful supercomputer Isambard-AI comes online The Isambard-AI supercomputer is made fully operational as the government unveils fresh AI plans.

Yesterday, at the University of Bristol, the AI Research Resource (AIRR) officially launched — bringing serious compute power to UK researchers.

It includes Dawn at Cambridge and Isambard-AI, one of Europe’s most powerful AI supercomputers.

More from the BBC: www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

The Research Computing Services team swapped servers for nostalgia yesterday at an away day at the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge.

Great day for learning, sharing ideas, and connecting as a team!

Finally, we're proud sponsors this year of the #ISC25 Women in HPC programme.

Go team RCS!

#ISC25

At another poster session, Deepak Aggarwal shared his work, “Scaling AI Research Capabilities Through National Federated Infrastructure.”

Meanwhile, Surbhi Goel from the Institute of Computing for Climate Science presenting her poster, “Benchmarking Platform for Machine Learning-Based Spin-up of Ocean Model NEMO.”

We’re having a fantastic time at #ISC25! The conference has just started, and already members of Research Computing Services have been on stage showcasing the incredible work we do.

Here’s Christopher Edsall presenting at the Dell Community meeting on the work we've been doing this year.

Thank you to our Software Engineer, Simon Hartley, who delivered our lightning talk during the sponsors' session at #DurhamHPCDays. Great work!

It’s been a busy time at #DurhamHPCDays for the team. Our Systems Engineer, Astrid, spoke about working on establishing a new #WHPC chapter. Meanwhile, Joe from @iccscambridge.bsky.social mbridge.bsky.social gave a talk on HPC and AI in weather and climate research.

We’re proud to sponsor this year’s #DurhamHPCDays and to see our own Tom Meltzer kicking things off.

In our last RSE seminar for the academic year, Miles Cranmer (DAMTP, University of Cambridge) will be speaking about Symbolic Regression for Model Discovery in Python and Julia.

Thursday 5th June at 1pm in the JJ Thomson Seminar Room, Maxwell Centre and on Zoom.

rse.group.cam.ac.uk/seminars

Research Computing Services was proud to host the HPC Special Interest Group (HPC-SIG) Annual Meeting on May 21–22 2025 at the West Hub, University of Cambridge.

The event brought together UK academics and research computing professionals to explore the future of HPC and HTC.

🔗 bit.ly/44RlQxR

YouTube video by HPSF Numerical Relativity with AMReX - Miren Radia, University of Cambridge

Dr Miren Radia, Research Software Engineer at Research Computing Services, presents his work on numerical relativity software during the AMReX session at the High Performance Software Foundation conference held in Chicago in May this year.

#HPC #NumericalRelativity #AMReX #ResearchSoftware

We look forward to seeing you at the RSE Seminar this week.

Liam Pattinson and Peter Hill of York Plasma Institute will be telling us about Fortitude: A Modern Fortran Linter.

Thursday 22nd May at 1pm in JJ Thomson Seminar Room, Maxwell Centre and on Zoom.

rse.group.cam.ac.uk/seminars

Featuring Miren Radia (bottom left photo), one of our team's Research Software Engineers, who spoke at #HPSF on Numerical Relativity with AMReX.

We look forward to seeing you at the RSE Seminar, where Peichao Qin (Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Cambridge) will be speaking on "A Modular Character Recognition Solution for Ancient Scripts".

Thursday 15th May at 1pm, JJ Thomson Seminar Room, Maxwell Centre and on Zoom.

Congratulations, @amkasprzyk.bsky.social! We're excited to work with you!

#AIRR #Dawn