High performance computing has always played a major role at AWE as the organisation is responsible for managing the entire life cycle of the United Kingdom's nuclear deterrent. Since the cessation of underground nuclear testing, AWE's stewardship of the United Kingdom's nuclear deterrent is dependent on the use of large-scale computer simulations, including the visualization of scientific and engineering data.

Visualization is an integral component of AWE's technical computing facilities, and is essential to the understanding of the massive amounts of data produced in simulations. With the arrival of high-speed interconnect technologies, such as InfiniBand, 64-bit processors and PCI Express, Linux clusters can now be used to build scalable graphics engines to generate detailed visualizations.

AWE's Evolocity visualization cluster consists of Intel EM64T processors, with each node providing 16 GB of storage. Each rendering node has a PCI Express interface to a Nvidia FX3400 high performance graphics card and contains visualization packages such as Chromium, CEI Ensight, VTK and Paraview. The visualization cluster also includes cluster management tools from Linux Networx, Clusterworx and Icebox, to provide total cluster management from one interface.