DiRAC

Distributed Research using Advanced Computing (DiRAC) is an integrated supercomputing facility used for research in particle physics, astronomy and cosmology in the United Kingdom. DiRAC makes use of multi-core processors and provides a variety of computer architectures for use by the research community.^[2][3]

Distributed Research using Advanced Computing (DiRAC)

Named after	Paul Dirac
Established	2009
Location	Cambridge Durham Edinburgh Leicester
Services	Supercomputing
Director	Mark Wilkinson[1]
Parent organization	Science and Technology Facilities Council
Website	dirac.ac.uk

For other uses, see Dirac (disambiguation).

Development

• DiRAC: DiRAC was initially funded in 2009 with an investment of £12 million from the Government of the United Kingdom's Large Facilities Capital Fund combined with funds from the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) and a consortium of universities in the UK.^[4]
• DiRAC II: In 2012, the DiRAC facility was upgraded with a further £15 million^[2][3] of UK government capital to create DiRAC II which had five installations.
• DiRAC-3: was launched in 2021,^[5] with three services offered at four sites:^[6]
  • Data intensive service, jointly hosted by the universities of Cambridge (part share in the "Cumulus" HPC platform) and Leicester (Data Intensive 3 and Data Intensive 2.5x supercomputers)
  • Memory intensive service, hosted by Durham University at the Institute for Computational Cosmology (Memory Intensive 3 "COSMA8" and Memory Intensive 2.5 "COSMA7" supercomputers)
  • Extreme scaling service, hosted by the University of Edinburgh (Extreme Scaling "Tursa" supercomputer)

Paul Dirac

"DiRAC" is a backronym which honours the theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Paul Dirac.^[7]