"The benefit to companies of having access to this will mean that they can then change their response time to market and change their cost structure."

He added: "It has huge implications. It's those applications that were only available on big clusters; you will begin to see them on smaller arrays and that's when you will see supercomputing in cloud coming in very fast."

Wanduragala's thoughts echo the that have partnered to launch a supercomputing hub that aims to provide modelling, simulation and analysis services to SMEs.

The University of Warwick, University of Birmingham, University of Nottingham and Queen Mary, University of London, have each put in £1.5 million into the MidPlus high performance computing centre, while research funding agency EPSRC has provided £2 million in investment.