Modelling & simulation

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.

ParCo Symposium

Experiences of porting and optimising code for Xeon Phi processors

EPCC is jointly organising a symposium at the ParCo conference on experiences from those working on porting and optimising codes for this architecture about the challenges and successes they have experienced when working with the Xeon Phi, and how these also apply to standard parallel computing hardware.

The final analysis and future plans

A week ago we finished our 5 days of intensive work optimising CP2K (and to a lesser extent GS2) for Xeon Phi processors. As discussed in previous blog posts (Day4, Day3, Day2, Day1), this was done in conjunction with research engineers from Colfax, and built on the previous year's work on these codes by EPCC staff through the Intel-funded IPCC project.

Over 18 months ago, we kicked off the ExTASY project. Our lofty aim was to tackle one of the 'Grand Challenges' of biochemistry - effective sampling of complex biomolecules using Molecular Dynamics to provide a physical understanding of their function and behaviour.

The MPI 3.1 standard, a minor update to the existing MPI 3.0 Standard, was ratified last week at the latest MPI Forum meeting.