High Performance Computing facility

Facilitating impactful research
Plymouth Advanced Computing Centre
The Lovelace High Performance Computer is a strategic investment by the University to accelerate high-profile research across all faculties. It enhances key research areas, encourages new collaborations with industry, and fosters growth in data science, big data, and analytics for both teaching and industry upskilling.
The naming of the HPC ‘Lovelace’ was inspired by Ada Lovelace an inspirational figure for women in science and often considered the first computer programmer. Ada was an English mathematician and writer, who worked closely with Charles Babbage in the development of computer programmes.
The Lovelace HPC will boost research output across the University’s core disciplines, foster innovation, and facilitate knowledge transfer. This investment capitalises on the increasing adoption of AI and Big Data across the University. Additionally, the Lovelace HPC centre supports the expansion of HPC teaching for students and industry professionals. The Lovelace HPC centre will support new users with access to High-Performance Computing (HPC) approaches for research and teaching while actively supporting interdisciplinary projects.
Furthermore, this cutting-edge resource is accessible to staff and research staff across the university – thereby continuing to ensure that the University grow the ecosystem of researchers necessary for tackling some of the pressing challenges of our time.
Plymouth Advanced Computing Centre
Lovelace
Plymouth Advanced Computing Centre

High Performance Computing drives innovation across a wide range of fields, supporting interdisciplinary projects and powering computationally intensive numerical simulations across all faculties. The Lovelace system enables a broad array of workflows, from high-performance simulations on CPUs to training large AI models on cutting-edge GPUs. The facility plays a pivotal role in advancing academic research while also offering valuable opportunities for teaching.

Vincent DrachDr Vincent Drach
HPC lead

The Lovelace HPC centre has been designed to support the diverse needs of researchers from across the University and and in industry. The Lovelace HPC is being applied to numerical simulations in Offshore Renewable Energy (ORE), particle physics, earthquake simulations, predictive phenomics of developing organisms and an incredible large-scale data analysis in fields such as health sciences, bioinformatics, and operational research.
The centre supports Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications with two nodes accelerated by state-of-the-art GPUs and is equipped with a cutting-edge interconnect (network), enabling the parallelization of large, communication-intensive problems.
Furthermore, the system is complemented by Lenovo’s LiCO software, which provides a graphical interface to simplify the use of clustered computing resources for AI development and has been designed to improve accessibility by students and staff. The centre also has an expansive, cutting-edge, large object storage solution with a capacity of 2PB.

Hardware details - the system features various types of resources:

60x Standard CPU nodes:
  • Dual AMD EPYC 9354 (2x32 cores)
  • 384 GB of RAM per node
2x High Memory CPU nodes:
  • Dual AMD EPYC 9354 (2x32 cores)
  • 1536 GB of RAM per node
1x GPU L40s Accelerated Node:
  • Dual AMD EPYC 9354 (2x32 cores)
  • 1536 GB of RAM per node
  • 8x NVIDIA L40s PCIe (40GB per card)
1x GPU H100 Accelerated Node:
  • Dual AMD EPYC 9354 (2x32 cores)
  • 1536 GB of RAM per node
  • 4x NVIDIA H100 SXM (80GB per card)