Warwick . at its Centre for Scientific Computing (CSC) in November 2010.

The university will increase its current capacity to give a 6,000 core cluster by the summer. It said that the upgrade will enable it to carry out very large and realistic simulations quickly and efficiently.

Meanwhile, a 2,900-core cluster at Queen Mary has been designed to provide significant capacity for tasks that involve running large numbers of simulations with different data sets.

In addition, Birmingham and Nottingham are establishing a large file store and data archive, which will be mirrored between the two sites, to ensure the security and integrity of the data. This will enable businesses to access the research databases generated by the four universities, as well as allow them to store or commercialise their own in-house databases.

OCF, the data processing, management and storage provider, , an on-demand service that allows any UK business to use processing power from universities' HPC facilities, in December 2010.