Recipient organisationDurham UniversitySource-published name: Durham University
Funding£300K
PeriodJul 2025 — Mar 2026
In plain English
AI plain-English summary
Durham University is buying £300,150 worth of computer hardware—storage servers, CPU cores, and graphics processing units—to expand the computing capacity available to UK scientists through the IRIS Federation. The IRIS Federation pools computing resources across UK universities to support data-intensive science, from particle physics to climate modelling. This grant funds the next wave of equipment at Durham’s DiRAC facility, which is part of that national network. Without this hardware, researchers would face bottlenecks when processing large datasets or running complex simulations. The new equipment includes 200 terabytes of hard-drive storage, four front-end servers, 1,180 CPU cores, and four high-end GPUs for visualisation. These components will let scientists analyse data faster, run more detailed simulations, and share results across institutions. The work is fundamental science—it does not have an immediate commercial application. But the computing infrastructure it supports underpins discoveries in fields such as astrophysics, materials science, and fluid dynamics, where past investments in shared computing have enabled breakthroughs that would otherwise have been impossible.
View original technical description
This grant supports IRIS Federation to deliver compute to its science activities by placing hardware at Durham University. This email is to confirm that IRIS has approved the procurement of storage, CPU, GPU and storage server nodes at DiRAC Durham in spending plan phase 1 for FY 25-26. In total the total equipment spend approved to be invested at DiRAC Durham is £261,000. Including the additional 15% funding provided by IRIS, the total investment at DiRAC Durham comes to £300,150 for which the grant application is to be submitted. The breakdown of approved amount is as follows: 1. £20,000 for procurement of 200 TB of HDD EC storage estimated at £200/TB for fillable storage. Including 15% additional funding, the total approved amount is £23,000. 2. £40,000 for procurement of 4 front end Ceph storage server nodes estimated at £10,000 per unit. Including the 15% additional funding, the total amount is £46,000. 3. £177,000 for procurement of 8 GB/core or 10 GB/core 1180 CPU cores estimated at £150/core. Including 15% additional funding, the total approved amount is £203,550. 4. £24,000 for procurement of 4 visualization GPUs (RTX6000 ada) with vGPU licenses estimated at £6000/GPU card. Including 15% additional funding, the total approved amount is £27,600. Please may we request you to acknowledge this email and submit the TFS application in the next 4 weeks so that the funding can be disbursed soon? The TFS submission guidance is attached with this email.
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