Article Technology

Why host HPC in Iceland? Big Data for life sciences

To tackle the ‘big data’ requirements of our genomics and bioinformatics research, we wanted to explore the benefits of remotely managing our HPC resources.

08 February 2017

As part of our new partnership with Icelandic-based data infrastructure providers Verne Global, a first for the academic HPC (high-performance computing) community in the UK, we speak to Head of our Scientific Computing Dr Tim Stitt on the exciting project which will reduce our energy costs by 70%.

To tackle the ‘big data’ requirements of our genomics and bioinformatics research in decoding living systems, we wanted to explore the benefits of remotely managing our HPC resources. The Verne Global Icelandic campus provides an economical solution by protecting against energy price inflation over the next 10-20 years, with their environmentally friendly and fully sustainable power supply, free cooling and optimised design infrastructure to reduce the total costs of our scientific computing infrastructure.

See our video interview, below.