Abstract. The Oxford Supercomputing Centre OSC was established in April 1998 to provide high-performance computing services to a consortium of Oxford University research groups. The main computer resource, an 84-processor SGI Cray Origin 2000 known as Oscar, is being deployed in a wide variety of research studies covering biological, medical, chemical, mathematical, physical and engineering topics (including parallel computing itself).

In this paper we shall describe the queueing and accounting mechanisms we have developed to facilitate effective use of this powerful resource. We shall also describe innovative work in progress to optimise the performance of this machine, using simulation and genetic algorithms.