Blog

During the past year EPCC has increased its engagement with the Machine Intelligence Garage, a UK Government programme that supports innovative startups which make use of machine-learning techniques and artificial intelligence (AI).

Part of the Machine Intelligence Garage's remit is to enable technical support, such as HPC services, which is provided by various partners. For example, its industrial partners include AWS, Google Cloud, and NVIDIA. EPCC is a founding partner and we also offer support and potential collaboration for interested startups.

SC, the world's largest high-performance computing conference, will be held virtually during the week of November 9-13. It is a disappointment not to be going to SC in person, but the flip side is that the conference will be open to a wider audience than would have been possible had it been held in Atlanta as originally planned.

This year I am organising the second run of the Urgent HPC workshop, which is an event aimed at bringing together those who are researching the role of HPC and data science in making urgent decisions to tackle disasters. The event first ran last year at SC19 and comprised a keynote talk by the founder of Technosylva – the world’s leading wildfire simulation code development company – six technical papers, and a panel. Based upon that success we decided to run the workshop again this year, and given all that has happened since then, exploring this topic is more timely than ever before! 

Edoardo Coronado visited EPCC from 18th May–15th August 2019 under the HPC-Europa3(link is external) programme. Here he gives us an update on his research since his previous blog article.

During my visit to EPCC in 2019 under the auspices of the HPC-Europa3 programme, I worked on optimising routines to perform the Sparse Matrix-Vector (SpMV) product, a common operation in lots of scientific applications, on Intel Xeon Gold processors and Graphics Processing Units (GPUs).

In June, a unique collaboration between the University of Edinburgh, the Financial Data and Technology Association, and Fintech Scotland was awarded £22.5m from UK Government to harness financial data for societal and economic benefit. The Global Open Finance Centre of Excellence (GOFCoE) will be an independent collaboration between governments and regulators, the financial services, industry and academia.