DiRAC

Distributed Research using Advanced Computing (DiRAC) is an integrated supercomputing facility used for research in particle physics, astronomy and cosmology in the United Kingdom. DiRAC makes use of multi-core processors and provides a variety of computer architectures for use by the research community.

Development
Initially DiRAC was funded with an investment of £12 million from the Government of the United Kingdom's Large Facilities Capital Fund combined with funds from the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) and a consortium of universities in the UK. In 2012, the DiRAC facility was upgraded with a further £15 million  of UK government capital  to create DiRAC II which had five installations.

DiRAC-3 was launched in 2021, with three services offered at four sites:
 * Data intensive service, jointly hosted by the universities of Cambridge (part share in the 'Cumulus' HPC platform) and Leicester (Data Intensive 3 and Data Intensive 2.5x supercomputers)
 * Memory intensive service, hosted by Durham University at the Institute for Computational Cosmology (Memory Intensive 3 (COSMA8) and Memory Intensive 2.5 (COSMA7) supercomputers
 * Extreme scaling service, hosted by the University of Edinburgh (Extreme Scaling 'Tursa' supercomputer)

Paul Dirac
DiRAC is a backronym which honours the theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Paul Dirac.