Durham DiRAC-2 petascale facility

A supercomputer capable of performing a thousand trillion calculations per second will be built at Durham University to tackle the biggest unsolved problems in astrophysics and cosmology. This petascale facility addresses a critical gap: the most complex simulations of the universe—how galaxies form, how stars ignite, how magnetic fields shape cosmic gas clouds—simply cannot run on existing machines. Without this computing power, researchers are stuck with approximations that miss key physics. The facility will run "Grand Challenge" calculations that model the universe from the Big Bang to the present day, tracking billions of particles to see how dark matter and ordinary matter interact over cosmic time. This is fundamental science with no immediate practical application. The research will produce no new materials, drugs, or devices. But it will answer foundational questions: how did the first stars and galaxies form? What role do magnetic fields play in star formation? Past investments in such high-performance computing have unexpectedly driven advances in weather forecasting, aircraft design, and data analytics. Deeper understanding of cosmic structure formation could, over decades, inform everything from plasma physics to climate modelling.