CSAR is one of the two UK national supercomputing services for the academic research community - provided on behalf of the Research Councils (the other being HPCx). EPSRC is the managing agent for the Research Councils, acting for the other councils - EPSRC, NERC, ESRC, BBSRC. The service started in November 1998 and is run as a 6-year PFI contract with a value of £26 million to provide a world-class supercomputing facility to enable world-class science by UK researchers.

CSAR is also used by commercial customers.

These are supported by a number of other SGI Origins, a Storage Area Network (SAN) providing high performance access to a large quatities of disk and tape. For more information see the CSAR website.