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EPCC is part of a £4.4 million project to turn a database of millions of clinical images into a powerful research tool to help tackle health conditions including lung cancer and dementia.

Each year millions of clinical images such as X-rays, CT, MRI, ultrasound, nuclear medicine, and retinal images are generated by the NHS in Scotland and stored in the national imaging database. In addition to containing important clinical information, these images also potentially contain a great deal of information about the health of the individual which is not currently made use of in health care.

EPCC and other partners at the University of Edinburgh have commenced work on a new programme to develop DataLoch, a data repository for all local, regional and national health and social care data for residents of the Edinburgh & South East Scotland region. DataLoch and the associated Data Driven Innovation team will drive research and innovation, improve patient care, and reduce health inequalities across the region.

The HPC-Europa3 programme funds collaborative visits of up to three months for researchers at any level, in any discipline, who need access to HPC resources.

HPC-Europa3 has now been welcoming visitors to EPCC – and another eight HPC centres around Europe – for nearly two years. The successful applicants to date are from a total of 43 countries. Priority is given to researchers working in the EU and Associated States, but limited places are available for researchers working elsewhere who can make a strong case for funding. There is a roughly equal split among the visitors between post-graduates, postdocs, and experienced researchers, and a wide variety of disciplines are represented.

We have been pleased to see that, compared to previous programmes, there has been an increase in the participation of female researchers, who have accounted for 23% of successful applications so far.

The European Centre of Excellence for Engineering Applications (EXCELLERAT) has spent its first year identifying the major challenges that must be overcome to reach Exascale performance for a set of reference applications.

There are great opportunities for engineering applications in exploiting exascale computing (that is, more than 1018 operations per second). This will be the case not only in academia but also industry: engineering is seen as having the biggest potential for exascale in the industrial field. EXCELLERAT brings together expertise in HPC and engineering software to support the development of applications that can exploit computing capability at this level.