Hosted and managed by independent research organisation The James Hutton Institute in north east Scotland, the UK CropDiversity High-Performance Computing (HPC) cluster has handled more than 400 terabytes of new data in the last 12 months alone. This is equivalent to around 100,000 high definition movies.

Its huge number crunching capacity, with processing power equivalent to about 80,000 standard laptops, allows significant gaps in knowledge about the natural world, crops, and diseases to be unlocked much faster than it could be otherwise done.

One recent project saw the HPC help assess extinction risks for the world’s flowering plants for scientists at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew—work that took just days, but would have previously taken many weeks to do.

Dr Iain Milne, who manages the UK CropDiversity HPC at the Hutton, remarked: “Since the first building blocks of the HPC were put in place in 2020, about 19 million analysis tasks have been run, using more than 100 million hours (or nearly 11,500 years) of computing time—how long each of the processors we have has been running—and covering more than a petabyte of data.

“While most of the work it is doing is focused on scientific research, it is a capability that’s also available to commercial organisations who need access to this level of computing.”

The HPC recently handled its largest data throughput for a single project, at 25 terabytes, for the Biodiversity for Opportunities, Livelihoods and Development (BOLD) project—a Crop Trust initiative the Hutton is a partner on. It looks to strengthen global food and nutrition security by supporting the conservation and use of crop diversity.

Fraser Macfarlane, machine learning engineer at the Hutton, noted: “Time is not on our side and we need to move fast if we are to find solutions to the very real, fast moving impact of climate change on crop resilience and so we need to be able to fast track so much of the research and these machines do it.”

“Here at the Hutton, it’s helping process ever expanding datasets generated by the likes of high-throughput phenotyping. This process uses a suite of sensors and cameras to monitor and understand how plants grow and develop.

“Additionally, the vast quantities of remote sensing data produced by satellites and aerial platforms like drones can be analysed, helping us understand the world around us.”

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This year alone, more than 20 scientific papers have been published based on work that relied on the UK CropDiversity HPC, such as the development of seedless clementines.

The HPC partners are the National Institute of Agricultural Botany (NIAB), The Natural History Museum, Scotland’s Rural College, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, University of Edinburgh at the University of St Andrews.

It was funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council and Advanced Life Sciences Research Technology Initiative (ALERT) grants, as well as The Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Public Sector Research Establishment Infrastructure Fund.