Company Details
Name: EPCC
Date Founded: 1990
Sector: R&D
Key Products/Services: Supplier of supercomputing and data services
Website URL: www.epcc.ed.ac.uk
Executive Summary
EPCC, which is based at The University of Edinburgh, has operated national supercomputing services since the 1990s on behalf of users from academic, public and private sector organisations from across the UK who want to use supercomputing and data analytics for their R&D activities. With an unparalleled array of large-scale systems for modelling and simulation, data analytics and AI, EPCC has recently been recognised as the UK’s first National Supercomputing Centre.
The Challenge
Supercomputing sets itself challenges to move forward. Over the past decade, reaching the exascale age has been the goal. An exascale supercomputer can perform a billion billion calculations per second. Over the past 6 years, EPCC has worked with the Government to develop a plan for an exascale supercomputer for the UK. Such a system would give UK companies and universities access to a capability that their competitors in the US and Europe already have access to. This is even more urgent thanks to the emergence of general AI.
The Solution
The UK’s companies and universities need national supercomputing and in June 2025, the UK Government announced an £750m investment. The new service will be hosted by EPCC at our Advanced Computing Facility data centre from mid-2027 and will bring an exascale capability to the UK for the first time. The service will also have a greater focus on industry usage than ever before.
The Impact
Every plane we fly in will have been modelled on a supercomputer, as will the materials used to build our televisions, our mobile phones, our laptops – indeed all of the electronics that surrounds our daily lives today. If we’re ill, we may take drugs that have been developed by modelling their structure and interactions. The wind turbine blades which turn across Scotland will have been modelled and optimised on supercomputers. These huge computing infrastructures impact all of our lives every day.
Future Plans
Supercomputing never stands still. By 2032 we’ll be preparing to install the successor to this system. We don’t yet know what it will look like or how much performance it may have. It may even have quantum accelerators by then!