The School of Computer Science is setting up a High Performance Computing Centre (HPCC), funded by an Advantage West Midlands grant. The core of this centre is a 6-node, 24 Itanium-II CPU cluster. This cluster is based on ‘Madison’ CPU, the latest revision of Intel’s Itanium architecture, which offers 50% higher clock rates and a larger cache size. As far as we are aware, this is the first cluster of this type to be installed in the UK. A dedicated file server offers more than 1 TB disk space with a high-speed link to the cluster, and 10 fast workstations allow access to the cluster.