Critical Mass of Expertise

The STFC Daresbury Laboratory has 550 staff, who support the work of over 5000 scientists and engineers from industry and the university research community. The on-site facilities are used in a diverse range of research programmes, including physical and engineering sciences, biomedical and environmental research and materials development
and characterisation.

The Computational Science and Engineering Department (CSED) within the UK's Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) provides world-class expertise and support for the UK theoretical and computational science communities, in both academia and industry.

The major output of the CSE Department is the development and application of powerful simulation codes, usually in collaboration with university research groups. They place particular emphasis on achieving very high performance; advancing the basic computational methods to tackle new scientific challenges on new generations of hardware.

Most of the 80 staff within the CSE department are computational scientists developing high-performance applications software in the core areas of quantum chemistry, molecular simulation, solid-state physics, materials simulation, engineering and environmental simulations. These applications themes are complemented by key activities in numerical algorithms, software engineering and high performance computing technology.

In all of their projects, CSED collaborate with and support theoreticians and computational scientists in the universities and colleagues within the experimental facilities at STFC. In addition to the core applications, CSED also supports a number of data activities such as the Chemical Database Service.

Harnessing this critical mass is the Daresbury Advanced Computation Service (DAComS).  DAComS enables your organisation to fully exploit capacity computing facilities based on commodity components (e.g. Intel and AMD processors) and ensure a maximum return on investment, with services including:

- Consultation on a wide range of technology issues
- Procurement support
- Installation and system administration advice
- Optimized and fully integrated application/hardware bundles
- Customer, commercial and CSED codes

During a visit in August 2011 David Cameron confirmed £10M of investment into STFC's Daresbury Laboratory at the Daresbury Campus of which £7.5M will be used to upgrade the Campus computing infrastructure to be able to host the next generation of high performance computing systems.

This investment will lead to the creation of the International Centre-of-Excellence in Computational Science and Engineering (ICE-CSE). It will also enable the creation of next-generation simulation software and demonstrate a step change in the UK's ability to address key challenges and deliver new breakthroughs in science - from more accurate weather and climate prediction, to developing cleaner and more efficient energy sources and modelling new medicines.