DataVita is to host Charger, a powerful new high performance computing system funded by UK Research and Innovation and delivered by a UCL led consortium, following a £19.5 million, five year award to expand the UK’s national research computing capability.
Charger will provide researchers across the UK with access to high speed compute for a broad range of disciplines, from medicine and engineering to climate science, materials discovery and the digital humanities. It will help accelerate simulation, analysis and innovation at national scale.
A new national compute resource for UK research
Charger is one of four newly funded National Compute Resources designed to provide the computational capability required to process large datasets and run complex simulations. Together, these resources form an important step in delivering the UK Compute Roadmap, the national plan launched by Government in July 2025 to strengthen the UK’s position as a global leader in high technology research.
The Charger system will comprise more than 37,000 CPU cores. It is designed to support a wide range of academic and industrial applications, including workloads that benefit from running many tasks in parallel, enabling more researchers to access national scale compute for real world research.
Dr Owain Kenway from UCL Advanced Research Computing said:
“Charger boosts the UK’s capability to do real computational research across a wide variety of fields (including but not limited to the physical sciences, biosciences, social sciences and humanities) and puts compute power in the hands of researchers who might otherwise be denied access to larger resources because of the way their problems are structured (many small tasks rather than one large one).
“As part of this service, we are also committed to putting part of the system into the hands of undergraduate students on courses around the country. This will give them invaluable experience learning how to use real, national scale high performance computer systems and preparing them for a world where research increasingly relies on computers for large scale simulation and data analysis.”
Professor James Hetherington, Director of UCL Advanced Research Computing, said: “UCL Advanced Research Computing is delighted to have been selected as a host of the National Compute Resource. We're a hybrid of a professional information technology service and a research centre, and we look forward both to delivering reliably for the UK and to discovering and sharing new things about how we best use computers to do science.”
Hosted with DataVita in Scotland for performance and sustainability
Charger will be hosted at DataVita’s Scottish data centre campus, bringing national scale high performance computing into an environment purpose built for high density, liquid cooled infrastructure. Designed to support next generation CPU and GPU platforms, DataVita’s facilities provide the resilience, efficiency and operational headroom required for demanding research workloads.
The Charger system will run on Hewlett Packard Enterprise technology, including HPE Slingshot networking and HPE Cray storage, enabling the high speed connectivity and robust data handling needed to support a wide range of applications, from complex simulation to large scale data analysis.
Locating Charger with DataVita in Scotland, rather than in London, is expected to deliver a carbon saving of around 465 tonnes of CO2e per year. This benefit is supported by Scotland’s comparatively low carbon electricity supply, alongside year round free air cooling enabled by the cooler Scottish climate, helping reduce the environmental impact of high intensity compute at national scale.
Supporting wider access and skills development
A key objective of the National Compute Resources programme is to widen access to national scale compute across the research community, including for disciplines and projects that have not traditionally relied on supercomputing. The service also includes a commitment to make part of the system available to undergraduate students on courses around the country, helping develop the practical skills needed for a future where research increasingly relies on large scale simulation and data analysis.
What this partnership means for UK research compute
Danny Quinn, Managing Director of DataVita, said:
“We want to thank UCL for choosing to partner with DataVita. By combining the research excellence and innovation leadership of leading London institutions with the environmental and cost advantages of hosting in Scotland, this approach brings together world class compute capability with measurable sustainability benefits. Our recent designation as an AI Growth Zone further demonstrates our infrastructure readiness, market credibility and strategic importance within the UK’s sovereign AI and HPC landscape, reinforcing why Scotland and DataVita represent the most efficient and future proof location for high performance AI and supercomputing workloads.”
Richard Gunn, Digital Research Infrastructure Programme Director at UKRI, said:
“With the award to UCL, UKRI is significantly expanding the capacity of our national network to handle a huge range of research tasks. This system is designed to be a versatile and reliable resource for a vast array of use cases, from life sciences and humanities to engineering. Our goal is to ensure that the UK’s research community has the digital horsepower required to solve complex challenges and maintain our global edge in innovation.”
Part of a broader UK national compute network
The other National Compute Resources are led by the universities of Edinburgh, Birmingham and Cambridge. Together, the four resources are intended to provide diverse technology tailored to different research needs, easier access so more researchers can benefit, and long term support through a combination of advanced equipment and five years of expert service, up to 2031. These new resources will work alongside the UK’s existing flagship AI and supercomputing services.
Charger is expected to be fully available to researchers later in 2026.