Who uses ICR’s supercomputing facilities?
L: It is primarily designed for internal work conducted by our own researchers. We have around 40 or so using it so far, but there are plans to federate the system meaning up to 200 staff can use it eventually. The nice thing is that the ICR is a broad institute so there are a lot of different groups involved, from imaging and patient data, to physics models for radiotherapy, for example. In the future we might also figure out a way to share our processing capacity with other institutions [via grid computing]. C: How much did it all cost? L: The computational infrastructure cost millions of pounds over ten years, but another point is the human resource required to generate the data we need – that involves employing hundreds of people over many years, and is a big, expensive project. The money comes from charity funds, but we are now going out to different agencies to ask for ongoing financial support for maintenance. It is often easier to get money for installing large systems than it
