The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) has deployed a 24.41 petaflops AI supercomputer at its Hartree Centre in Daresbury, UK.

Housed within the STFC’s new £30 million ($40m) supercomputing center in Daresbury, the system has been named Mary Coombs in tribute to the UK’s first female commercial computer programmer.

The supercomputer is the successor to the center’s current system, Scafell Pike – a BullSequana X1000 system containing Intel Skylake CPUs and Intel Xeon Phi accelerators. In a statement, STFC said Mary Coombs is more energy efficient than its predecessor, and will be used to support research into drug discovery and climate prediction.

No further information on the system’s hardware has been provided, other than that it is GPU-based. In 2024, STFC said it had signed an agreement with Lenovo to install a 44.7 petaflops supercomputer at Hartree.

DCD has reached out to STFC to clarify if the center is still intending to deploy this Lenovo-based supercomputer, or if the newly deployed Mary Coombs is a downgraded version of the system announced last year.

“Here at the Hartree Centre, our new Mary Coombs supercomputer can provide UK industry with the computing power, expertise and skills needed to turn ambitious ideas into real-world solutions,” said Professor Kate Royse, director of the STFC Hartree Centre.

“By giving industry access to world-class AI and high-performance computing, and to the leading skills of our Hartree Centre scientists, Mary Coombs can help businesses innovate with confidence, accelerate research, and bring solutions to market more quickly, delivering tangible benefits for our economy and society.”

The Hartree Centre is a high-performance computing, data analytics, and AI research facility that was founded in 2012 at Daresbury Laboratory, which is itself housed on the Sci-Tech Daresbury science and innovation campus.

The Mary Coombs system forms part of the Hartree Centre’s £210 million ($280m) Hartree National Centre for Digital Innovation (HNCDI) program, a collaboration between STFC and IBM. STFC is a UK-based government agency that carries out research in science and engineering; its Hartree Centre is part of the UKRI.