Partnership puts computational science at the heart of Unilever’s R&D  

The Science and Technology Facilities Council’s (STFC) Hartree Centre has become Unilever’s R&D global partner for high performance computing, an agreement which provides the consumer products company access to the most powerful supercomputer in the UK.

Software tools created by scientists at Hartree will be used by Unilever’s product researchers to run exceptionally fast simulations predicting how different ingredients in products will interact with each other and how they can be mixed and processed efficiently enabling the company to develop and improve consumer products using environmentally-friendly manufacturing methods.

Welcoming the announcement, Minister for Universities and Science David Willetts said: "This agreement is a ringing endorsement of the world-leading facilities and expertise at STFC’s Hartree Centre, which alongside industrial and academic partners has recently benefitted from £30 million of new government investment. It shows the huge potential of high performance computing to revolutionise the product design process, driving growth and fostering innovation between the research base and industry."

The agreement was signed by Professor John Womersley, Chief Executive at STFC, and Jim Crilly, Senior Vice President, Strategic Science Group at Unilever.

On signing, Jim Crilly said: “Unilever’s R&D Strategy commits us to a digitally enabled future of e-Science and big data. Our partnership with Daresbury’s Hartree Centre will give our R&D community a powerful competitive edge when we have fully integrated the high performance computing capabilities of Daresbury. Through this partnership we’ll be able to tackle even bigger scientific challenges and unlock breakthrough innovations faster.”

Based at STFC’s Daresbury Laboratory in Cheshire, which sits within the Sci-Tech Daresbury science and innovation campus, the Hartree Centre was officially opened by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rt Hon George Osborne, on Friday 1 February. Home to the most powerful supercomputer in the UK, nicknamed the “Blue Joule”, it is one of the fastest computers in the world, capable of more than 15 trillion calculations per second, and is linked to the Hartree Centre’s cutting edge 3D Visualisation Suite.