Modelling & simulation

This week we said goodbye to our Summer of HPC students Anna, Marta and Tomislav.

These students from around Europe have spent the last 7 weeks with us at EPCC immersed in HPC, and each working on a specific project in the field. This is a great because not only do they gain experience and interest in HPC but we also get a useful, tangible, outcome from these projects.

With my Software Sustainability Institute hat on, I recently participated in a back-to-back Data Carpentry and Software Carpentry course sponsored by the University's Research Data Service here at the University of Edinburgh. The courses were held in the main University library in a gorgeous room with a glass wall, providing a rather distracting view of the Meadows parkland. 

Initial experiences on early KNL

Updated 1st August 2016 to add a sentence describing the MPI configurations of the benchmarks run.
Updated 30th August 2016 to add CASTEP performance numbers on Broadwell with some discussion

EPCC was lucky enough to be allowed access to Intel's early KNL (Knights Landing, Intel's new Xeon Phi processor) cluster, through our IPCC project.  

KNL is a many-core processor, successor to the KNC, that has up to 72 cores, each of which can run 4 threads, and 16 GB of high bandwidth memory stacked directly on to the chip.

Over the last 10 years, the growth in performance of HPC systems has come largely from increasing core counts, which poses a question of application developers and users – how to best make use of the parallelism on offer?

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.