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Earlier this year, HPE announced the Catalyst UK programme: a collaboration with Arm, SUSE and three UK universities to deploy one of the largest Arm-based high performance computing (HPC) installations in the world. EPCC was chosen as the site for one of these systems; the other two are the Universities of Bristol and Leicester.

EPCC's system (called 'Fulhame' after pioneering chemist Elizabeth Fulhame) was delivered and installed in early December. This HPE Apollo 70-based system consists of 64 compute nodes with two 32-core Cavium ThunderX2 processors (ie 4096 cores in total), 128GB of memory composed of 16 DDR4 DIMMs, and Mellanox InfiniBand interconnects. It will be made available to both industry and academia, with the aim to build applications that drive economic growth and productivity as outlined in the UK government’s Industrial Strategy.

The Advanced Computing Facility (ACF) on the outskirts of Edinburgh is the high performance computing data centre of EPCC.

Built in the 1970s and operated by EPCC since the turn of the millennium, the ACF site has had significant investment over the years. At present, there are three Computer Rooms, imaginatively called: Computer Room 1 (CR1), Computer Room 2 (CR2), and Computer Room 3 (CR3).

EPCC has received funding via the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) to continue its work with the Scottish Administrative Data Research Partnership (S-ADRP).

The aim of the partnership is to enable research that leads to policy decisions that will in turn will help Scotland progress towards the vision outlined in the National Performance Framework. This framework helps to shape high level research priorities for Scottish Government, including tackling poverty, providing quality jobs and fair work for all, and ensuring that we live in inclusive, empowered, resilient and safe communities. S-ADRP consists of a number of Strategic Impact Programmes (SIPs) each dealing with a research priority.

In February EPCC will host an event to explain why data driven innovation is important for industry. We will also showcase how companies are already using data technologies to enhance commercial performance.

There is a lot of hype around big data and big computing for business, but it is undeniable that the influence of data-driven innovation will be profound.

The expertise and support available in Scotland has created a massive opportunity for our engineering and manufacturing sectors and, with the launch of the £500m Data-Driven Innovation (DDI) strand of the Edinburgh and South-East Scotland City Region Deal, this is an exciting time for exploring how technology can benefit business.