Modelling & simulation

The BonFIRE project created a multi-cloud facility to foster experimentation and testing of cloud and distributed applications. Just last week BonFIRE had its final, successful review. The project was rated Excellent, a true reflection of the effort contributed by the partners and the results that we achieved.

Software

When we started BonFIRE three and a half years ago, we had nothing tangible, only promising people and some ideas. By Month 2 we had the first set of requirements; by Month 4 the first Architecture, including a definition of the BonFIRE offering and the BonFIRE Principles; and by Month 12, the first facility for our partner-experimenters to use. By that time we were a team.

Today computer simulation is firmly established as the third pillar of science beside theory and experiment. As part of its research activities on modelling and large-scale simulation of soft condensed matter, EPCC maintains a long-standing collaboration with the Institute for Condensed Matter and Complex Systems (ICMCS) at the University of Edinburgh and the Centre for Computational Science at University College London.

Alongside APES, EPCC plays an important role in another project jointly funded by EPSRC and the US National Science Foundation to overcome one of the "Grand Challenges in the Chemical Sciences".

The PRACE Summer of HPC is a placement programme for undergraduate and postgraduate students. This post was written by Antoine Dewilde, one of the students who spent the summer here at EPCC.

In a previous post, I presented my project on making a dinosaur racing competition. In that post, I gave some background information about virtual palaeontology, and the purpose of my project here in Edinburgh. If you haven’t read it yet, now might be a good time to do so!

So, now that the project (and the summer) is almost finished, let us see what has happened in these past two months – and what you will soon be able to enjoy!

The first PRACE Summer of HPC (SoHPC) programme has now finished. Each of the 4 students hosted by EPCC has made a short video about their project, which you can watch below. You can also read about the students in my earlier post.

Is a dinosaur faster if it has longer legs? Is it better for it to be bigger, and hence cover more distance, or to be smaller and lighter? Which species is the fastest? Thanks to high-performance computing, you will soon be able to experiment yourself, and try and find answers to all those questions!

This post was written by Jon Hill from Imperial College, who used to work at EPCC and has been collaborating with us recently. 

I always jump at the chance to work with EPCC. Not just because they are my former employers (ah, the joys of Friday buns). Nor is it due to Edinburgh  being one of my favourite cities and collaborating with EPCC is a good excuse to visit. The main reason for collaborating with EPCC is to use the wealth of experience the people working there have on making scientific code go even faster. Whilst this is extremely important to our research, we don't have the time to do both science and improve code performance.

The second and final day of the Beatbox workshop that Adrian Jackson described yesterday consisted of a tutorial where some of the participants were walked through running Beatbox scripts and using Beatbox in general. 

The whole set-up was done using a bootable 8Gb Linux USB key which contained the key components, including part of the Beatbox distribution. That worked quite well and would be worth considering for this kind of course. The attendees got to take the USB keys away so they could continue evaluating Beatbox after the event, which is kind of neat.

I'm just preparing to give a talk, along with my colleague Mario, at the Beatbox workshop being held at Manchester University this week. Beatbox is an HPC environment for Biophysically and Anatomically Realistic