NAA Member News: STFC Hartree Centre launches new supercomputer with ten-fold performance increase
The Science and Technology Facilities Council’s (STFC) Hartree Centre has launched Mary Coombs, a new supercomputer designed to accelerate innovation across UK industry.
Housed within STFC’s new £30 million Supercomputing Centre at Daresbury Laboratory, the system is named in honour of Mary Coombs, the UK’s first female commercial programmer. The GPU-driven machine delivers a ten-fold performance increase over its predecessor, providing 24.41 petaflops of processing power to support advanced AI, data-intensive research and high-fidelity visualisation.
For businesses and public sector organisations, this means the ability to analyse vast and complex datasets faster, more efficiently, and without the need for in-house supercomputing expertise. Applications range from drug discovery and climate modelling to digital engineering and industrial R&D.
Mary Coombs forms a part of the £210 million Hartree National Centre for Digital Innovation programme, a collaboration with IBM that supports UK organisations in adopting digital technologies like AI, quantum computing and data analytics.
Find out more here: https://www.hartree.stfc.ac.uk/technologies/mary-coombs/
Professor Kate Royse, Director of the STFC Hartree Centre, said:
“Here at the Hartree Centre, our new Mary Coombs supercomputer can provide UK industry with the computing power, expertise and skills needed to turn ambitious ideas into real-world solutions.
By giving industry access to world-class AI and high-performance computing, and to the leading skills of our Hartree Centre scientists, Mary Coombs can help businesses innovate with confidence, accelerate research, and bring solutions to market more quickly, delivering tangible benefits for our economy and society.”
