The UK and Scottish governments have opened the Crop Innovation Centre (CIC) at the James Hutton Institute in Scotland, housing the Crop Diversity high-performance compute (HPC) cluster.
Home to both the Advanced Plant Growth Centre (APGC) and the International Barley Hub (IBH), the 8,000 square meter (86,111 sq ft) building in Invergowrie, outside Dundee, will also house a phenotyping center, due to open in Spring 2025.
The APGC and IBH innovation centers were funded by a £62 million ($80.6m) investment by the UK and Scottish governments through the Tay Cities Region Deal (TCRD), which aims to future-proof crop production and improve food and drink security.
First deployed in 2019, the Dell-based Crop Diversity system supports the development of new informatics tools and the implementation of advanced analysis of crop genetics diversity data. It is run by the James Hutton Institute’s Information & Computational Sciences (ICS) Research Computing team and the Scientific Computing section of the National Institute of Agricultural Botany’s (NIAB) IT team.
However, according to Crop Diversity’s website, the system is currently undergoing “significant upgrades,” meaning up-to-date information about its hardware and performance is not currently available. Pre-upgrade, the system contained 116 Intel and AMD CPUs providing more than 1,800 cores, 17TB of memory, and 1.5PB of storage.
The machine is available to researchers and select collaborators including the NIAB, Scotland's Rural College, the Royal Botanical Gardens of Edinburgh and Kew, and the Natural History Museum.
“These projects at the world-renowned James Hutton Institute demonstrate Scotland’s cutting-edge research and innovation in practice,” said Ian Murray, UK secretary of state for Scotland. “Both projects will be key to our future food security, and to ensuring a thriving future for rural communities everywhere.”
In addition to the Crop Diversity supercomputer, Scotland was also meant to be home to the UK’s first exascale computer before the government announced it would not be moving forward with the project, citing budget restraints.
Despite the university having already spent £31m ($38m) building a new wing of its EPCC’s purpose-built Advanced Computing Facility to house the system, in August 2024, the UK government said the project was an unfunded spending commitment made by the previous administration and would therefore not provide the university with the expected funding.
As a result, university vice-chancellor Sir Peter Mathieson has been personally lobbying ministers in an attempt to get the funding restored.