Modelling & simulation

This week sees our annual collaboration workshop with Tsukuba University, Japan (more details are available here).  This is a great chance to get a flavour of the kind of research another HPC centre is undertaking, how they work, and what platforms they are investing in.

The Centre for Computational Sciences (CCS) at Tsukuba is a department very like EPCC, in that it is responsible for high performance and parallel computing at the university, runs and supports large-scale computers for researchers, and undertakes parallel computing research.

A consortium of Europe’s leading supercomputing centres and HPC experts is developing the Fortissimo Marketplace, a one-stop-shop where end-users will access modelling and simulation services, plus high-performance data analytics.

Last week we held the 3rd annual CP2K users group meeting down at Kings College London.  Amazingly, we are already half-way through the 5-year 'CP2K-UK' project - the EPSRC-funded community support effort that I'm leading - how time flies!  It was great to see these meetings continue to go from strength to strength.  This year we had over 50 people there on the day from around the UK but also a significant proportion from overseas too!  While the primary aim of our activities is to support the UK research community, if we have a wider impact that's of course a bonus.  

Or why debugging is hard and parallel debugging doubly so

Debugging programs is hard. I give a lecture on debugging for the Programming Skills module of EPCC's MScs in HPC and HPC with Data Science where we try to point out common programming mistakes, programming strategies for making bugs less likely, and the skills and tools required for investigating, identifying, and fixing bugs.

In early December we added a visualisation of the most heavily used application codes to the ARCHER website.  At the moment it only shows data for the current month, but we've been recording the data since the ARCHER service began back in 2013 (table below).

Lancaster University, 7-8 April 2016

The programme for the HPC-CORE (High Performance Computing-based Computational fluid dynamics for Offshore Renewable Energy) workshop has now been published. This event brings together scientific specialists from Engineering, Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences, and HPC experts to discuss the state of the art for simulation software, and the leading-edge simulations being undertaken with such software.

The Met Office/NERC Cloud model (MONC) has been developed in a collaboration between EPCC and the Met Office. MONC delivers a highly scalable and flexible Large Eddy Simulation (LES) model capable of simulating clouds and other turbulent flows at resolutions of tens of metres on very large domains.  

One of the projects I'm currently leading at EPCC is ExTASY, which is building an 'Extensible Toolkit for Advanced Sampling and analYsis'.  I've blogged in the past about the goals of the project, and the painful process leading up to our first public release. As the project is now well into its final year, we are turning our attention to community outreach - showing off what we have built to the biomolecular simulation community and getting their feedback.

Since 2013, EPCC has hosted PRACE Summer of HPC (SoHPC) students for eight weeks from early July. I was involved with SoHPC for the first time this year as mentor of two Masters students, Jana Boltersdorf from FH Aachen University of Applied Sciences (Germany) and Ondřej Vysocký from Brno University of Technology (Czech Republic).

The Fortissimo Marketplace is now open for business.

Fortissmo lowers the barriers for industrial users to access HPC-based simulation by offering the benefits of the cloud computing model (such as pay-per-use), together with support for first time users. Making HPC simulation more accessible to SMEs will increase their competitiveness - one of the key goals of the I4MS programme that supports Fortissimo.