Modern scientific discovery is driven by one thing, without which breakthroughs like gene sequencing, the search for the Higgs boson and dark matter and huge telescope arrays wouldnt be possible High Performance Computing (HPC).

With the computational might to blitz through millions of bytes of data, calculations and statistical possibilities, scientists were able to posit the existence of particles like the Higgs boson and campaign for expensive projects like the Large Hadron Collider because they could show what they were looking for.

The same kind of processing power is whats allowing the UKs version of the Genome Project, attempting to sequence whole genomes rather than just excerpts known as exons, to go ahead.

Cambridge University has had HPC in one form or another for 18 years, from the old 80s supercomputer sitting in the middle of a room, to its modern new server facility, which is based on a large Dell Dell server cluster made up of 9.600 cores and four petabytes of storage running on a Hadoop platform and is currently getting its finishing touches after a 20m investment.

Cambridge Universitys new HPC system, used for particle physics, radio astronomy, gene sequencing and other big data, big science projects. (Credit: Cambridge University)

The university has one of the largest research and development budgets in the UK education sector, devoting 40 per cent of its 1438m annual revenue to funding advances in the fields of astronomy, genomics, medicine, physics and many more.

But its HPC time is also hired out to businesses in the nearby science and technology park, helping the university to pay for top IT support, while providing a valuable niche service to firms.

Just a few years ago, that kind of commoditisation of HPC wouldnt have been possible, Dr Paul Calleja, director of HPC Service at Cambridge, told visitors in a talk attended by Forbes.

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