University of Edinburgh buys French supercomputer The University of Edinburgh is to buy a BullSequana XH2000 supercomputer from Atos of France. “The system will constitute the extreme scaling service of the UK’s DiRAC HPC facility,” according to Atos. “The platform will allow scientists across the STFC theory community to drive research in particle physics, among other areas, using Nvidia GPUs and AMD processors.” DiRAC (distributed research utilising advanced computing) combines high-performance computing resources hosted by the Universities of Edinburgh, Cambridge, Durham and Leicester. This agreement forms part of a £20m investment upgrade DiRAC by the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) World Class Laboratories scheme, through the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), said Atos.: “The investment is delivering new systems which are up to four times more powerful than the existing DiRAC machines.”