The High Performance Computing and Business Incubation Centre is set up by the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham, in partnership with AWM Innovation team, to provide affordable access to high-performance computing facilities to SMEs and start up companies in the West Midlands.

Much progress in technology-driven and knowledge-intensive businesses and industries has been made in recent years due to the availability of affordable high-performance computing (HPC) facilities. This is particularly true in areas such as modelling, simulation, visualisation, design, optimisation, data mining, etc. and the benefits of such applications span across most sectors: ICT, Automotive, Medical, Entertainment, etc.

HPC provides an opportunity to increase technology content and enables the move towards higher value-added products, services and increased efficiency than is possible with a desktop. However, it is neither practical nor cost-effective for every SME to have their own such facility, since they present very high setup and maintenance costs.

Through the centre, local businesses will not only have access to the hardware, but also to the services and expertise that are essential to the effective use of these resources either through the University of Birmingham or any interested academic institution in the region. The projects may stem either directly from companies or from other organisations in the West Midlands region whose work will either directly benefit SMEs or lead to potential spin-offs.

The core of this centre is a 6-node, 24 Itanium-II CPU cluster. This cluster is based on the 'Madison' CPU, the latest revision of Intel's Itanium-II architecture, which offers 50% higher clock rates and a larger cache size than its predecessors. This is the first cluster of this type to be installed in the UK. A dedicated file server offers more than 1 TB hard disk space with a high-speed link to the cluster. Ten high-specification workstations allow direct access to the cluster itself.