Blog
Edinburgh Carpentries: spreading good practice in software
Author: Guest bloggerPosted: 14 May 2019 | 10:24
Lucia Michielin, currently working for the Software Sustainability Institute, tells us about the Edinburgh Carpentries effort and a networking event to be held on the 24th of May.
Edinburgh Carpentries, a new training initiative, was launched on September 2018 at the University of Edinburgh in collaboration with the Software Sustainability Institute. Since then the initiative has started to propagate to other institutes in the Edinburgh area, eg Heriot Watt University. Edinburgh Carpentries uses and leverages teaching materials and infrastructure from The Carpentries (carpentries.org) .
Preparation for the ISC 2019 Student Cluster Competition
Author: Xu GuoPosted: 2 May 2019 | 15:44
This blog was contributed by TeamEPCC for ISC19 Student Cluster Competition. Photo shows (left to right): Mark Klaisoongnoen, Zhenzhong Xu; Christodoulos Stylianou, and Mario Martinez Requena.
Please visit us at Booth A-1453 at ISC 2019 in Frankfurt and vote us as your favourite team!
In the international ISC Student Cluster Competition (SCC), student teams build small clusters of different architectures to achieve the highest performance by running a series of applications and benchmarks under 3kW peak power limitation. The competition will be held in June in Frankfurt (Germany) as an integral part of the ISC High Performance Conference and Exhibition, and TeamEPCC will be there.
Using OpenRefine to create new datasets
Author: Mario AntoniolettiPosted: 28 Apr 2019 | 16:07
One of the benefits of teaching a Carpentry course is that it can increase or deepen your understanding of a subject. A recent instance for me was in using OpenRefine, a tool that runs locally on your machine (you do not have to export your data to a third party service).
OpenRefine can help you:
• Explore and clean/transform your data. You can reconcile your data with other external data sources, i.e. enrich your data using external data
• Create a new dataset. It does not modify your original data and keeps provenance of all the steps. Depending on the capabilities of your local machine it can deal with data sets that are up to about 100k rows.
Watch the videos on the OpenRefine website for a good overview. If you want to know more, follow the Carpentry OpenRefine for Ecologists lesson. In this example, I am going to show how easy is to generate a new dataset from the EPCC website. Follow along after you have installed OpenRefine on your system.
HPC Certification Programme: the HPC environment survey
Author: Weronika FilingerPosted: 26 Apr 2019 | 13:31
We are embarking on a survey of the HPC environment and would appreciate your input! Jean-Thomas Acquaviva, DDN Storage, explains the background below.
Supercomputers are helping us to solve the world greatest challenges but who is helping us to harness the computational power of supercomputers?
The HPC Certification Forum is a community effort that aims to provide an international certification programme for the skills needed by practitioners to harness supercomputers. It aims to clearly categorise, define, and examine competencies, which will be beneficial to all stake-holders involved in training and education. To make this effort relevant to the whole HPC community, a number of online surveys and polls will be created to capture and estimate the importance of the various tools, technologies, and skills expected from HPC practitioners.
Accelerating cloud physics and atmospheric models using GPUs, KNLs and FPGAs
Author: Nick BrownPosted: 24 Apr 2019 | 11:51
The blog post below is based on the abstract of a talk at the PASC mini-symposium 'Modelling Cloud Physics: Preparing for Exascale' (Zurich, 13 June 2019).
The Met Office NERC Cloud model (MONC) is an atmospheric model used throughout the weather and climate community to study clouds and turbulent flows. This is often coupled with the CASIM microphysics model, which provides the capability to investigate interactions at the millimetre scale and study the formation and development of moisture. One of the main targets of these models is the problem of fog, which is very hard to model due to the high resolution required – for context the main UK weather forecast resolves to 1km, whereas the fog problem requires 1metre or less.
Promoting Science on Computers to Schools - Workshop Event
Author: Clair BarrassPosted: 16 Apr 2019 | 11:27
Funded by EXDCI-2, EPCC is organising a 2-day workshop in Edinburgh on 8-9 July 2019 to present ideas on how science and engineering can be supported from Raspberry Pis to large scale supercomputers. We are looking to investigate how to introduce these topics to school-age audiences including linking to existing school curricula. This will include examples of existing education materials and activities and looking ahead to current plans.
Software Sustainability Institute's Collaboration's Workshop: another success!
Author: Mario AntoniolettiPosted: 15 Apr 2019 | 10:41
This year's Software Sustainability Institute's Collaboration's Workshop, CW19, was held from 1–3 April at the University of Loughborough. There were almost 70 attendees from all over the UK and further afield too - Germany, the Netherlands and the US. I am of the opinion that this is one of the best types networking workshops I have been to, possibly equalled by the UK RSE conferences.
Software Sustainability Institute's Collaborations Workshop 2019 (CW19)
Author: Mario AntoniolettiPosted: 19 Mar 2019 | 10:16
The Software Sustainability Institute's (SSI) Collaborations Workshop 2019 (CW19) will be held at the West Park Teaching Hub, Loughborough University, Loughborough from 1-3 April 2019. This year the workshop will be themed around topics based on interoperability, documentation, training, and sustainability. Keynote speakers will include Catherine Stihler, CEO of Open Knowledge International, and Franziska Heine (link points to a German article), Head of Software & Development at Wikimedia Deutschland. They will open the event on 1st April.
Event review: What data-driven innovation means for business in Scotland
Author: Mark SawyerPosted: 6 Mar 2019 | 10:13
EPCC is at the heart of the Data Driven Innovation programme of the Edinburgh and South East Scotland City Region Deal. This £661m programme will lead to the creation of major new data services for Scottish business, with EPCC providing the World Class Data Infrastructure (WCDI) that will underpin it.
Last week we hosted an event to explain the enormous potential of data-driven innovation for industry and to show how companies are already using data technologies to enhance commercial performance.
Proof-driven queries to preserve patient privacy
Author: Mike JacksonPosted: 4 Mar 2019 | 09:42
In our role as members of the Research Engineering Group of the Alan Turing Institute, Anna Roubickova and I worked with Efi Tsamoura and Benjamin Spencer (Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford) on PDQ, a proof-driven query planner that has great potential within the realm of data science for medical research.
