Blog
Webinar: Containers for high performance computing
Author: Gavin PringlePosted: 17 Sep 2021 | 14:13
The next e-Seminar from CompBioMed will take place on the 6th of October at 14:00 BST. Michael Bareford, EPCC, University of Edinburgh, will introduce the principles behind using containers for high performance computing.
Research software now easy to cite on GitHub
Author: Jacalyn LairdPosted: 15 Sep 2021 | 15:47
Researchers can now easily cite the software they use with GitHub’s new built-in citation support, giving proper credit and recognition to those who develop research software.
Researchers can now get the recommended citation for software on GitHub, through its support for the Citation File Format (CFF). If a code repository contains a CITATION.cff file, GitHub will provide the citation ready to use in a publication. Two other tools have announced support for CITATION.cff files: Zenodo will import the information automatically for a software release, and Zotero will add the software citation to a researcher’s reference collection.
From HPC-Europa3 to Huawei Programming Languages Research Laboratory
Author: Catherine InglisPosted: 9 Sep 2021 | 16:45
Marcos Maroñas was an HPC-Europa3 visitor in 2019, when he was a PhD student at Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). Marcos has now completed his PhD and recently relocated to Edinburgh – in the middle of the pandemic – to take up a new job. Here Marcos tells us how his career has developed.
HPC-Europa3 visit: Investigating the opto-electronic properties of small nanoalloys during a pandemic
Author: Guest bloggerPosted: 24 Aug 2021 | 15:18
Mirko Vanzan, a PhD student from the University of Padova, submitted an application to the HPC-Europa3 programme in February 2020, just before the world went into lockdown due to Covid-19. The resulting delayed start meant that instead of visiting his host, Dr Francesca Baletto, at her home institute, King's College London, in 2020, the visit eventually took place in 2021 in Donostia-San Sebastián in Spain, where Dr Baletto was spending a sabbatical year. This made Mirko's visit highly unusual, but it turned out to be very successful nevertheless. In this blog article, Mirko tells us all about his visit.
FPGAs for HPC, but this time it’s different
Author: Nick BrownPosted: 10 Aug 2021 | 10:05
For over a decade our community has enjoyed significant performance benefits by leveraging heterogeneous supercomputers. Whilst GPUs are the most common form of accelerator there are also other hardware technologies which can be complementary.
Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) enable developers to directly configure the chip, effectively enabling their application to run at the electronics level. There are potential performance and power benefits to tailoring code execution and avoiding the general purpose architecture imposed by CPUs and GPUs, and as such FPGAs have been popular in embedded computing for many years but have not yet enjoyed any level of uptake in HPC.
PRACE Summer of HPC 2021
Author: Mario AntoniolettiPosted: 3 Aug 2021 | 16:51
EPCC is once again participating in the PRACE Summer of HPC (SoHPC) 2021 but, because of the Covid-19 pandemic and the subsequent curtailment in travel, things are being run slightly differently this year.
It was apparent from the start that travel would not be possible, and so this PRACE SoHPC for 2021 became a virtual event. Regrettably, this means that students do not get to travel to meet other programme participants either during the training week or at the hosting site. However two students instead of the usual one have been allocated to each project, which includes the aspect of remotely working in a team.
Administrative Data Research (ADR)
Author: Mark SawyerPosted: 30 Jul 2021 | 10:01
ADR Scotland (Administrative Data Research Scotland) is a partnership combining specialists in the Scottish Government’s Data Sharing and Linkage Unit with the expertise of academic researchers at the Scottish Centre for Administrative Data Research. Together they are transforming how public sector data in Scotland are curated, accessed and explored, so it can deliver its full potential for policymakers and for the public.
Developing an outbreak analysis platform
Author: Lucy NorrisPosted: 27 Jul 2021 | 11:49
EPCC is working with ISARIC4C, the Coronavirus Clinical Characterisation Consortium, to develop an integrated analysis platform that will be hosted in part on the Edinburgh International Data Facility.
The data analysis platform provides a unique combination of linked, curated data from UK sovereign data assets, together with a flexible high performance compute space. Created for COVID-19 research, the ISARIC4C data analysis platform combines the data safeguards of an NHS trusted research environment, with more than £100M of new exabyte-scale computational capacity at the home of the UK national supercomputer. This creates a unique opportunity to combine clinical, biological, genomics and virology research in a secure, openly-accessible framework.
CompBioMed: creating virtual humans
Author: Gavin PringlePosted: 22 Jul 2021 | 14:09
EPCC is a Core Partner of CompBioMed, a European Centre of Excellence focused on the use and development of computational methods for biomedical applications. We prepare these applications for future exascale systems, to create the first virtual humans: digital twins to enable personalised medicine.
Quantum computing at EPCC
Author: Oliver BrownPosted: 23 Jun 2021 | 09:15
Computing doesn’t come much more novel than quantum computing.
Classical computers rely on the manipulation of bits, physical systems (usually transistors) that can be found in one of two states, which we label 0 and 1. Quantum computers on the other hand, use quantum bits (qubits) which can be measured in one of two physical states, still labelled 0 and 1, but can exist in any linear superposition of the two – they can be in 0 and 1.
Such a fundamental change at such a low level means that programming a quantum computer, or even developing quantum algorithms is very different to what we’re used to.
