09 Mar 2026
UKRI recently announced the first phase of UK National Compute Resources (NCR) that will provide high performance computing facilities (HPC) to support research across the country.
Cirrus is one of the initial set of four NCRs and is the only one that is already up and running and supporting researchers. As part of the UKRI investment, Cirrus will be more than doubling in size over the next few months. Cirrus will compliment the announced next national supercomputer which, like Cirrus, will also be operated by EPCC, the first UK National Supercomputing Centre.
The investment will add more compute nodes to Cirrus with the same dual CPU socket layout as the current nodes and, once complete, will take the total number of CPU cores available on Cirrus to over 150,000. We expect the additional Cirrus resources to be available to researchers by Autumn 2026.
We will provide more concrete dates for the Cirrus expansion as soon as they are available.