New £3.5m supercomputing investment set to boost region’s competitiveness

The University of Birmingham is one of four institutions leading on a £3.5 million supercomputing hub, which is set to power growth and innovation in the Midlands and London by opening up its vast number-crunching power to local firms. The University of Warwick is leading the project to launch MidPlus, a state-of-the-art high-performance computing centre, to help SMEs and larger firms with the modelling, simulation and analysis needed to design world-leading products and services. MidPlus will provide extra computing capacity to sectors such as aerospace, automotive, biomedical and advanced materials as well as delivering supercomputing skills to the local workforce. The investment consists of £2 million from the research funding agency EPSRC and £1.5 million from the four partners - University of Warwick, University of Birmingham, University of Nottingham and Queen Mary, University of London. The move is linked to a Government drive to increase the UK's capacity to exploit high-performance computing in optimising process design - a key requirement to boost industries such as advanced manufacturing, scientific research and financial services. The new centre's facilities will be available to businesses along the M1/M6 corridor in the East and West Midlands and London. As well as offering significantly increased capacity to local firms, Midplus will also deliver consultancy and training services which tap into the universities' combined expertise in high-performance computing.