Durham DiRAC-2 petascale facility support

The grant is to support the established Durham Petascale facility. The petascale facility is designed to enable data intensive science "Grand Challenge" calculations tackling a range of scientific problems in fields including cosmology, star formation and magnetohydrodynamics and other areas of the science programme of the DiRAC facility. Resources would be offered to "Grand Challenge" projects in cognate scientific disciplines that use related computational techniques and have common hardware and software requirements. Details are provided in the Business Case attached to this form which was submitted to STFC in November 2011 and discussed at the meeting of the DiRAC Project Management Board held at Leicester University on 21/Nov/2011.

DiRAC would seek to engage with industry at various levels, from the provision of computing cycles for industrial applications to the exchange of technical knowledge and shared training programmes. The facility will serve to train young scientists in the most advanced techniques for supercomputing. These have extensive application beyond academia, for example in industry. Finally, output from Dirac-based projects will be used for science outreach activities. Details are provided in the Business Case attached to this form which was submitted to STFC in November 2011 and discussed at the meeting of the DiRAC Project Management Board held at Leicester University on 21/Nov/2011.