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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.

For the fourth year running, from Wednesday 13^th March to Saturday 16^th of March,  EPCC will be attending the Big Bang Fair (BBF) at the NEC in Birmigham to demonstrate the wonders of supercomputing. The BBF encourages young people to adopt STEM-based subjects at school and later as a career – not only through universities but also apprenticeships and other career choices. This is also a great opportunity for our colleagues to undertake some outreach.

The MPI Standard states that nonblocking communication operations can be used to “improve performance… by overlapping communication with computation”. This is an important performance optimisation in many parallel programs, especially when scaling up to large systems with lots of inter-process communication.

However, nonblocking operations can also help with making a code correct – without introducing additional dependencies that can degrade performance.

Analysing genomics data is a complex and compute intensive task, generally requiring numerous software tools and large reference data sets, tied together in successive stages of data transformation and visualisation.

Typically in a cancer genomics analysis, both a tumour sample and a “normal” sample from the same individual are first sequenced using NGS systems and compared using a series of quality control stages. The first control stage, ‘Sequence Quality Control’ (which is optional), checks sequence quality and performs some trimming. While the second one, ‘Alignment’, involves a number of steps, such as alignment, indexing, and recalibration, to ensure that the alignment files produced are of the highest quality as well as several more to guarantee the variants are called correctly. Both stages compromise a series of intermediately computing and data-intensive steps that very often are handcrafted by researchers and/or analysts.