Routes to Access Compute

There are a number of ways to access compute that might be relevant to CCP-AHC members.

Please contact the CCP-AHC team if you are interested in receiving support in identifying the most suitable.

Institutional

Many UK institutions that support teaching and research have some compute provision. This is typically provided by a research IT or "research computing" division if it exists, or by partnerships or the central IT function if it does not.

CCP-AHC maintains an index of institutional and regional compute sites. You can perform searches over the public-facing documentation for these sites to find the nearest or most relevant resource.

National

In some cases, it will benefit your case to recieve access to a national resource if you have already explored whether your application can make use of regional or institutional compute.

AI Research Resource (AIRR) Gateway route

Designed for researchers from academia, industry, or other UK organisations, this route supports: first-time users of AI supercomputing resources; testing of (novel) algorithms, code, and workflows; benchmarking of algorithms, code, and workflows before applying for larger AIRR opportunities.

For more details, please read the guidance available online.

UKRI Access to high performance computing facilities

This opportunity provides an open and flexible route to computational support for high quality projects across the entire UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) remit. Applications that: involve early career researchers; onboard and train new users; significantly push the boundaries in computational research using high performance computing (HPC) in your field are encouraged.

This application process is purely for compute resource for up to 12 months. No funding is available to successful applicants.

You must be based at a UK research organisation eligible for UKRI funding.

For more details, please read the guidance available online for a previous iteration of the call. These calls are typically open twice a year.

International

European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) EU Node

The European Commission funds a compute and data storage service called the EOSC EU Node.

If you require non-commercial compute for more technical users (including Jupyter notebooks with GPUs for researchers), at the moment the Commission is giving away free credits at the time of writing (January 2026).

Anyone at institutions at countries that are in or associated to Horizon Europe can sign on using their institutional credentials (via eduGAIN). We would appreciate your experience working with this service. Please contact ccpahc@durham.ac.uk for more detail.