DiRAC
Distributed Research using Advanced Computing (DiRAC) is an integrated supercomputing facility used for research in particle physics, astronomy and cosmology in the United Kingdom. DiRAC makes use of multi-core processors and provides a variety of computer architectures for use by the research community.

Development
Initially DiRAC was funded with an investment of £12 million from the Government of the United Kingdom's Large Facilities Capital Fund combined with funds from the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) and a consortium of universities in the UK.  In 2012, the DiRAC facility was  upgraded with a further £15 million of UK government capital  to create DiRAC II which had five installations. 

DiRAC-3 was launched in 2021,  with three services offered at four sites:
 Data intensive service, jointly hosted by the universities of Cambridge (part share in the 'Cumulus' HPC platform) and Leicester (Data Intensive 3 and Data Intensive 2.5x supercomputers)
 Memory intensive service, hosted by Durham University at the Institute for Computational Cosmology (Memory Intensive 3 (COSMA8) and Memory Intensive 2.5 (COMSA7) supercomputers
 Extreme scaling service, hosted by the University of Edinburgh (Extreme Scaling 'Tursa' supercomputer)

Paul Dirac
DiRAC is a backronym which honours the theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Paul Dirac.

References

College and university associations and consortia in the United Kingdom
Information technology organisations based in the United Kingdom
Science and Technology Facilities Council
Supercomputers