UCL has been awarded £19.5 million by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) to host Charger, a new national supercomputer designed to accelerate research in fields ranging from drug discovery and genomic mapping to climate modelling and the humanities.
Led by UCL’s Advanced Research Computing (ARC) centre, the bid for Charger represents a major milestone in the UK’s Compute Roadmap. The facility will be one of four new “digital engines” (National Compute Resources) providing the massive processing power required for complex simulations and large-scale data analysis.
While Charger is a cross-disciplinary resource, it will be a gamechanger for the Faculty of Life Sciences. With more than 37,000 CPU cores, the system is designed to be accessible to the entire research community. For life scientists, this means enhanced capacity to model complex biological systems at an atomic scale, process vast genomic datasets to identify disease markers, and accelerate drug discovery through high-throughput virtual screening.
The success of the bid was a collaborative effort. While the project was spearheaded by Dr Owain Kenway (Head of Research and Development (Platform Technologies) at ARC), the submission was made possible by the vision and support of academic co-leads from across the university who ensured the specific computational needs of the biological and medical sciences were at the heart of the project.
Professor Andrea Townsend-Nicholson, one of the academic co-leads for the bid, commented:
“Securing Charger is a transformative moment for our Faculty. In the life sciences, the complexity of the data we generate, whether it’s structural biology, bioinformatics, or systems pharmacology, is rapidly outpacing our local compute capabilities. Having access to this level of national-scale infrastructure allows our researchers to tackle scientific questions that were simply intractable just a few years ago. It’s not just about speed; it’s about enabling a new generation of discovery.”
In a commitment to sustainability, Charger will be hosted by DataVita in Scotland. By utilizing Scotland’s cooler climate for free air cooling and its low-carbon electricity supply, the facility is expected to save approximately 465 tonnes of CO2e per year compared to a London-based installation.
Dr Owain Kenway (UCL ARC), PI on the bid, said:
“Charger boosts the UK’s capability to do real computational research across a wide variety of fields… We are also committed to putting part of the system into the hands of undergraduate students, preparing them for a world where research increasingly relies on large-scale simulation and data analysis.”
Links
Andrea Townsend-Nicholson UCL staff profile