A UCL-led team will receive £19.5 million over five years to provide a powerful, high-speed computing resource for researchers across the UK in areas ranging from medicine to engineering to history.
The computing resource, called Charger, will consist of more than 37,000 central processing unit (CPU) cores - the versatile "brains" of a computer. The system will power a wide range of academic and industrial applications, from climate modelling to engineering calculations to the design of new materials at an atomic scale.
Charger is one of four new "digital engines", known as National Compute Resources (NCRs), funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). Compute is the digital horsepower required to process data and run complex simulations. These new computing resources are a major step in delivering the UK Compute Roadmap, the national plan launched by the Government in July 2025 to make the UK a global leader in high-tech research.
While supercomputing was once reserved for niche technical fields, these resources are designed for everyone in the research community - whether a scientist is mapping the human genome, an engineer is designing greener planes, or a historian is analysing massive digital archives.
Dr Owain Kenway (UCL Advanced Research Computing), who is part of the UCL-led team that has received the funding, said: "Charger boosts the UK’s capability to do real computational research across a wide variety of fields (including but not limited to the physical sciences, biosciences, social sciences and humanities) and puts compute power in the hands of researchers who might otherwise be denied access to larger resources because of the way their problems are structured (many small tasks rather than one large one).
"As part of this service, we are also committed to putting part of the system into the hands of undergraduate students on courses around the country. This will give them invaluable experience learning how to use real, national scale high performance computer systems and preparing them for a world where research increasingly relies on computers for large scale simulation and data analysis."
Professor James Hetherington, Director of UCL Advanced Research Computing, said: "UCL Advanced Research Computing is delighted to have been selected as a host of the National Compute Resource. We’re a hybrid of a professional information technology service and a research centre, and we look forward both to delivering reliably for the UK and to discovering and sharing new things about how we best use computers to do science."
UCL Advanced Research Computing is responsible for centrally provided research IT services (data, compute, AI) at UCL. Its new Charger system builds on the success of the Materials and Molecular Modelling Hub, a high-performance UCL-led computing hub that served researchers modelling materials and molecules over 10 years.
The Charger system itself will run on Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) technology, including cutting-edge HPE Slingshot networking and HPE Cray storage. The system will be hosted with DataVita, which provides market-leading capability to support high-density, liquid-cooled high-performance computing and AI infrastructure, including next-generation GPU and CPU platforms. DataVita’s Scottish facilities are engineered to accommodate ultra-high-density environments while maximising efficiency through year-round free air cooling enabled by Scotland’s cooler climate.
By hosting this system with DataVita in Scotland instead of London, this will deliver a carbon saving of approximately 465 tonnes of CO2e per year due to Scotland having the least carbon intensive electricity supply of anywhere in the UK.
Danny Quinn, Managing Director of DataVita, said: "We want to thank UCL for choosing to partner with DataVita and by combining the research excellence and innovation leadership of leading London institutions with the environmental and cost advantages of hosting in Scotland, this approach brings together world-class compute capability with measurable sustainability benefits. Our recent designation as an AI Growth Zone further demonstrates our infrastructure readiness, market credibility and strategic importance within the UK’s sovereign AI and HPC landscape, reinforcing why Scotland and DataVita represent the most efficient and future-proof location for high-performance AI and supercomputing workloads."
Richard Gunn, Digital Research Infrastructure Programme Director, UKRI said: "With the £19.4 million award to UCL, UKRI is significantly expanding the capacity of our national network to handle a huge range of research tasks. This system is designed to be a versatile and reliable resource for a vast array of use cases, from life sciences, humanities, to engineering.
"Our goal in funding this facility is to ensure that the UK’s research community has the ’digital horsepower’ required to solve complex challenges and maintain our global edge in innovation."
The other NCRs are led by the universities of Edinburgh, Birmingham and Cambridge. By investing in these four distinct compute resources, UKRI is ensuring that researchers have access to:
- Diverse technology: Different types of hardware tailored to specific research needs.
- Easier access: A simplified system so that more researchers-including those who have never used supercomputers before-can benefit.
- Long-term support: The funding covers both the high-tech equipment and five years of expert service (up to 2031).
These new resources will work alongside the UK’s existing flagship AI and supercomputing services.
Charger is expected to be fully up and running for researchers later this year.
- Courtesy of HPE
Mark Greaves
m.greaves [at] ucl.ac.uk
+44 (0)20 3108 9485
- University College London, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT (0) 20 7679 2000
