HECToR

ARCHER (Advanced Research Computing High End Resource) is the next national HPC service for academic research. The service comprises a number of components: accommodation provided by the University of Edinburgh; hardware by Cray; systems support by EPCC and Daresbury Laboratory; and user and computational science and engineering support by EPCC.

The most recent top500 list has just been released at SC13 in Denver, and I'm pleased to say that 3 EPCC-hosted systems appear in the top 50:

The weekend of the 26th of October saw Eilidh, Fiona and myself attend the Manchester Science Festival (MSF)  at the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI).

This summer we were fortunate to have a student, Antoine, work on our dinosaur-racing outreach project as part of the Summer of HPC programme. Antoine did a great job in turning the demo from a simple prototype into a much more polished, usable showcase for how HPC plays a vital role in a variety of sciences. If you are a regular reader of the EPCC blog then you might have already read some posts about this application - see my initial blog post, and Antoine's progress updates here and here.

The Animal Simulation project, run at the University of Manchester, aims to create realistic simulations of animals both present and extinct. By combining the expertise of a number of scientific fields along with high performance computing (HPC), they have created GaitSym, a code capable of realistically simulating movements of animals based on a 3D model of their skeleton and biological data.

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

Cray Advanced Tools Workshop

As part of our PRACE Advanced Training Centre (PATC) programme, EPCC is hosting a "Cray Advanced Tools Workshop" in JCMB on 26-27 June using HECToR as the platform. If you are interested in attending see the event page on the PRACE website.