Collectively, the N8 universities undertake more than £650 million of research income per annum and employ over 18,000 academic staff.
The themes were chosen to build on existing research within the partnership which had the potential for economic and social benefit.
This provides industry and university researchers with access to high performance computing alongside consultancy and e-infrastructure training.
The original HPC supercomputer, hosted at the University of Leeds, was capable of performing 110 trillion operations per second, the equivalent of half a million iPads.
[17][18][19] In 2023, the N8 became the first coalition of British universities to coordinate policies on open access, issuing a statement calling for academics to retain rights to their work under a CC BY licence, which some publishers reject.
A report in 2016, commissioned by the group, demonstrated that they bring in £12.2 billion to the regional economy each year and generate 119,000 jobs across the North of England.