Research Computing Services (separated in August 2007 from the former Manchester Computing at the

University of Manchester , mottoeng = Knowledge, Wisdom, Humanity , established = 2004 – University of Manchester Predecessor institutions: 1956 – UMIST (as university college; university 1994) 1904 – Victoria University of Manchester 1880 – Victoria Univ ...

), provides the focus for the

's activities in supercomputing or

high-performance computing High-performance computing (HPC) uses supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems. Overview HPC integrates systems administration (including network and security knowledge) and parallel programming into a mult ...

, grid computing or

e-science E-Science or eScience is computationally intensive science that is carried out in highly distributed network environments, or science that uses immense data sets that require grid computing; the term sometimes includes technologies that enable dist ...

and computational science. Research Computing Services activities include services, training and research & development.

Supercomputers

The University of Manchester has been home to many

supercomputers A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions p ...

, starting from the 1948

Manchester Baby The Manchester Baby, also called the Small-Scale Experimental Machine (SSEM), was the first electronic stored-program computer. It was built at the University of Manchester by Frederic C. Williams, Tom Kilburn, and Geoff Tootill, and ran its ...

- the world's first stored program computer. Others have included CDC7600 (1972, and a second in 1977), a CDC Cyber 205, VP1200, VPX and 240/10. The CSAR service (see below)

included a 576 PE Cray T3E-1200E (1998, upgraded to 816PE in 2000), and SGI Origin 3000 (2001) and

Altix Altix is a line of server computers and supercomputers produced by Silicon Graphics (and successor company Silicon Graphics International), based on Intel processors. It succeeded the MIPS/ IRIX-based Origin 3000 servers. History The line w ...

(2003) systems. More recently some large clusters (e.g., the 200 processor Dell EM64T cluster) have been installed.

National Computing Services

Research Computing Services and its predecessors (Manchester Computing etc.) have been providing (high performance) computing services nationally in the UK since the 1970s. Manchester Computing operated the UK's 1998-2006 national supercomputer servic
CSAR
with SGI and CSC Ltd. It currently operates other national computer services in the UK, including the Access Grid Support Centre (AGSC) and, as part of consortia, th
UK National Grid Service (NGS)
an
North West Grid

Research Centres

Research Computing Services is a part of several research centres includin
E-Science North West (ESNW)
and the UK'
National Centre for e-Social Science (NCeSS)

References

External links

Research Computing Services web site

CSAR

National Centre for e-Social Science (NCeSS)

Access Grid Support Centre (AGSC)

UK National Grid Service (NGS)

North West Grid
{{authority control Computational science Information technology organisations based in the United Kingdom Research institutes in Manchester Supercomputer sites University of Manchester