Our support for industry

• The hosting, provision and management of high-performance computing (HPC) and data facilities for academia and business.
• Research and project support to optimise the computing activities of those organisations.
• Our unique project-based Applications Group, which provides bespoke novel and high-performance software solutions to academia, industry and commerce.

Current projects

Our bespoke project activity continues apace with new and ongoing collaborations with a variety of organisations, including software and architecture development for Apropos; enhanced CFD modelling via on-demand HPC for Eberspaecher and ICON Energy, and data architecture support to Jearni, an educational technology startup that is focused on the development of advanced digital technologies.

The development of key early-adopter commercial projects for the Edinburgh International Data Facility (EIDF) and the Data-Driven Innovation Programme continues. Our collaborations with the National Collection of Aerial Photography (NCAP) and Albyn Housing Society are expected to come on stream in early 2021. NCAP will use the Edinburgh International Data Facility to enhance its capacity to process digital imagery and provide research access to a growing library of datasets, while Albyn will utilise EIDF to store and manage datasets from smart homes for subsequent data science analytics and modelling to improve its residents' quality of life.

Cirrus: a Tier-2 resource for industry

With respect to the provision of HPC and data facilities, Cirrus, a national Tier-2 system hosted by EPCC, was recently upgraded via a £3.5m funding award from EPSRC. This included the addition of 144 NVIDIA V100 GPUs to the system and a 256TB high-performance storage layer for the most demanding data streaming applications. 

Cirrus is available to industry on a pay-per-use basis, and is regularly used to solve CFD and FEA simulation and modelling problems in sectors such as automotive, aerospace, energy, oil and gas, general engineering, life sciences, and financial services.  

The additional 144 GPUs provides a key resource for users to explore programming frameworks and accelerated versions of existing applications, in addition to supporting the exponential growth in articificial intelligence and machine-learning data science projects. Through a simple internet connection, users gain cost-effective access to Cirrus and can run their own codes as well as accessing a range of commercial software tools. 

Costs for industrial users of Cirrus are:

CPU £0.0369 per core hour used.

GPU £2.0357 per GPU hour used.

Disk storage up to 1 TB is provided at no cost.

Work with us

EPCC has a long track record of collaborating with industry, and our facilities and expertise are unmatched in Europe. Get in touch to discuss how we can help your business.