25 January 2022 | 0 minutes read

Live Long and Prosper – AWE welcomes Vulcan supercomputer

AWE’s latest supercomputer, Vulcan, entered active service just before Christmas, boosting AWE’s impressive research and simulation capabilities even further.

At Vulcan’s official opening ceremony AWE CEO Alison Atkinson and executive directors Andrew Randewich and Tony Mather were joined by VIPs from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), including Mark Armstrong, vice-president and general manager EMEA HPC, and members of the AWE teams which commissioned and installed Vulcan.

Vulcan is a Shasta River system from Cray, a HPE company. Installed in stages, beginning in 2020, successful site acceptance tests took place in the spring of 2021.

Functional and stability testing proceeded this followed by the deployment and quality assurance testing of the applications that the engineering and science community will use to run their simulations.

Pic caps:

AWE’s latest supercomputer, Vulcan
AWE and HPE view Vulcan in the data hall (l-r) Mark Armstrong (HPE) Ali Atkinson AWE, Tony Mather AWE.

More news

Strategic Alliance Partners Conference hits the mark

Senior representatives from AWE, the Defence Nuclear Organisation (DNO), the National Centre for Universities and Business (NCUB) and the university community gathered at the recently held Strategic Alliance Partners Conference to discuss and debate areas of STEM that support our mission. The two-day event organised by the External Technical Partnerships Office brought together government, academia, […]

Features

28 Apr 2025

Strengthening International Ties

International collaboration is vital in strengthening national defence and nuclear security and despite the high levels of security involved, collaboration amongst allies is strong. At AWE, a dedicated team of experts, advisors and business managers govern regular exchanges with international partners to facilitate collaboration and cooperation, and support research and development in nuclear science and […]

Detecting the undetectable

At AWE Blacknest, experts in forensic seismology work behind the scenes to support the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT). Their mission? To detect and verify potential nuclear tests worldwide by analysing seismic data. Our seismologists play a key role in upholding global security and arms control through cutting-edge research, international collaboration, and advanced monitoring techniques.