Software development

Over the last year I've been working with Prof. Jon Essex of Southampton University on an ARCHER eCSE project with the pithy title of "Implementation of Dual Resolution Simulation Methodology in LAMMPS".  

So what do I mean by dual-resolution simulations?

Developing for the real world

As part of a recent ARCHER eCSE project I developed a new parallelisation strategy for a computational simulation application to enable it to scale efficiently to larger process counts. We managed to significantly reduce the parallel overheads, so the code was accepted into the main repository for users to exploit.

The Software Sustainability Institute's Fellowship programme funds researchers in exchange for their expertise and advice.

Find out more about the 2017 programme with the Launch Webinar this Friday 9 Sep at 3pm!

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. 

Applications are now open for the Software Sustainability Institute’s 2017 Fellowship programme. Apply at bit.ly/fellowship-programme by 2nd October 2016.

This guest post by Simon Hettrick, Deputy Director of the Software Sustainability Institute, explains how the role of research software engineer has gained greater definition and recognition.

On a beautifully sunny day in March 2012, a small group met at Queen’s College Oxford and challenged a long-standing problem: why is there no career for software developers in academia? They didn’t know it at the time, but this meeting led to a nationwide campaign that created a vibrant and rapidly growing community, and established a new role in research: the Research Software Engineer.

Summer of HPC visitor Tomislav Subic gives a summary of his project at EPCC: a visualisation of the UK Met Office's weather model.

A legend says that there was once a warm sunny day in Scotland. I have started my quest to find out if the myth was true, but I was not the only one.

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?

Choice, choice, choice

I'm often asked "What programming language should I learn for scientific computing?".  Or I get involved in religious-like discussions about the best programming language for a particular task, or of all time (think Python vs Fortran, Go vs C, etc...). What's my answer?

Just recently I realised that, to me, programming languages are like musical instruments.