The Kelvin-2 Tier-2 High-Performance Computing Facility (HPC), which is based at the McClay Library at Queen’s, is the first national facility of its kind in Northern Ireland and is a collaboration between Queen’s University and Ulster University.

The supercomputer is capable of analyzing huge amounts of data and can deal with multiple requests at a time. This helps researchers to advance data, knowledge, and science in a way that was not possible previously.

Since 2019, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) has awarded £2.5m in funding for the HPC Facility. It is dedicated to researchers working on engineering simulations for marine renewable energy, neurotechnology, computational neuroscience, advanced chemistry, innovative drug delivery, precision medicine, metabolomics, and hydrogen safety.

Pictured at the launch of the £5m state-of-the-art national supercomputer at Queen's University are Professor Stuart Elborn, Interim Provost and Deputy Vice-Chancellor; Damien Coyle, Professor of Neurotechnology and Ulster University’s Principal Investigator; Dr Irina Tikhonova, School of Pharmacy, Queen's University; Dr Meilan Huang, School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Queen's University; Professor Roger Woods, Principal Investigator, Queen's University and Professor Liam Maguire, Pro Vice Chancellor for Research, Ulster University.

Dr. Meilan Huang's research group has been using the resource to design biocatalysts, which are then used to produce valuable products such as biofuels and pharmaceuticals. Our group participated in the NI-HPC User Conference as the demonstration group.

Dr. Meilan Huang explains: “The supercomputer has made a huge difference to my research, which focuses on computational chemistry and biology.

“Using the supercomputer, we can run very complex simulations which helps us to design biocatalysts. These are then used to manufacture biofuels and pharmaceuticals using renewable resources such as plants or agricultural wastes.”

She adds: “These jobs would usually take 24 hours on a normal personal workstation but they only take one hour on Kelvin-2. For simulation jobs on the complex chemical reactions, for example, in biological systems, the impact of the HPC is even more significant, reducing a typical job from six days down to one hour on Kelvin-2.

“The close collaboration with experimentalists from the Faculty of Medicine, Health and Life Sciences at Queen’s and industry means we can now use our new biocatalysts, designed by computational modelling, to produce biofuels and pharmaceuticals in a greener and more sustainable way, using renewable resources from nature. This has a positive impact on circular economy.”