You will study at EPCC, the UK’s leading supercomputing centre and a Centre of Excellence within the University's College of Science and Engineering. EPCC is a major provider of high performance computing (HPC) training in Europe with an international reputation for excellence in HPC education and research.

HPC is the use of powerful processors, networks and parallel supercomputers to tackle problems that are very computationally or data-intensive. You will learn leading-edge HPC technologies and skills to exploit the full potential of the world’s largest supercomputers and multicore processors. This is a well-established programme that has been successful in training generations of specialists in parallel programming.

Data science involves the manipulation, processing and analysis of data to extract knowledge, and HPC provides the power that underpins it. You will learn the multidisciplinary skills and knowledge in both HPC and data science to unlock the knowledge contained in the increasingly large, complex and challenging data sets that are now generated across many areas of science and business. Our staff have a wealth of expertise across HPC, parallel programming technologies and data science.

This is an applied and practically-focused programme where you will develop and run software using a range of programming languages and techniques. A core set of courses requires knowledge of one of C, C++, or Fortran; prior knowledge of any of these is not required as students are introduced to them at the start of the programme. Students should already be competent programmers e.g. in Java, Python, or one of the above-noted languages (see entry requirements, below), and keen to learn new programming approaches.

EPCC is the UK’s leading supercomputing centre with staff who are experienced HPC practitioners. EPCC is a major provider of HPC training in Europe with an international reputation for excellence in HPC education and research and a well-established on-campus MSc programme that has been successful in training generations of specialists in parallel programming. Students benefit from access to advanced HPC systems with recent examples including ARCHER (the UK national Tier 1 supercomputing service with over 100,000 cores) and Cirrus, an heterogeneous system EPSRC Tier-2 National HPC Facility.