HPC

The closing date for our Highly Skilled Workforce scholarships, open to Scottish and EU students, has been extended to May 28th. Scholarship applications should be made after completion of an MSc application. See https://www.ed.ac.uk/studying/postgraduate/applying/.

We also have a scholarship for the MSc in HPC with Data Science programme that is provided by the Registers of Scotland. The closing date is May 21st - see https://www.ed.ac.uk/student-funding/postgraduate/uk-eu/science-engineering/informatics/registers-of-scotland

Both the above have nationality restrictions - our own John Fisher scholarships are open to all. See https://www.ed.ac.uk/student-funding/postgraduate/uk-eu/science-engineering/informatics/masters-hpc

You can see details of both HPC Masters courses at the Computing and Informatics web page.

Dr Domenica Capasso was our first HPC-Europa3 visitor at EPCC but was hosted remotely at UCL from Nov 2017 to Dec 2017. She relates her experiences and research in this blog article.

I recently spent a month in London funded by the HPC-Europa3 programme and hosted by Prof. Francesco Luigi Gervasio at the Department of Chemistry at UCL. This was an exciting experience for me, primarily for my research work but it also provided me with an opportunity to visit London, a city I had never been to before. I arrived in London with interesting biological results on some potential inhibitors of the galectins class of proteins, which had been synthesized at my Institute in Naples. Galectins (Gal) are β-D-galactoside binding proteins that have important implications for many diseases including tumourigenesis, inflammatory response and autoimmune disorders. The general aim of this work is to rationally design novel inhibitors of galectins that could be used as anti-cancer and anti-inflammatory therapies.

This is a very exciting time for the MSc in HPC programmes. Our current students are halfway through their second semester of courses and are already starting work on developing their dissertation projects, while EPCC staff are looking forward to our summer move into the new Bayes Building. Located in the University's central area, this move will strengthen our existing collaborations with the School of Informatics.

The programme's Third Call for applicants is now open. It will close on Wednesday 28th February 2018.

The interdisciplinary HPC-Europa programme, which provides access to some of Europe’s top HPC facilities, is now running again. The programme pays travel and living costs for short collaborative research visits to a scientific host in another country. Applications can be submitted at any time, with four closing dates per year.

Dr Elsa Gonsiorowski is visiting EPCC from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California, this week. Dr Gonsiorowski is working closely with EPCC's David Henty on various parallel I/O research topics. In this post she introduces her work.

Last month I attended a collaboration workshop in Japan between the Centre for Computational Sciences (CCS) at the University of Tsukuba and EPCC. I was talking about the INTERTWinE project, which addresses the problem of programming-model design and implementation for the Exascale, and specifically our work on the specification and implementation of a resource manager and directory/cache.

This guest post is by Jakub Piotr Nurski, one of our 2017 Summer of HPC visitors.

 Almost two weeks have passed since my first visit to EPCC at the University of Edinburgh. I met my mentor Andy Turner in the first week and we started working on my project from the first minute of our meeting. Here is a little background to the idea of a project...

A team of students from EPCC's MSc programmes took part in this year's Student Cluster Competition at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) in Germany. The competition requires teams to design and configure a cluster on which they optimise and run benchmarks and applications within a power budget of 3000 watts.

Here Team EPCC and its coach Emmanouil Farsarakis tell us about their hard work and its rewards.

The Student Cluster Competition is held three times a year, at Supercomputing, ISC High Performance and the Asia Student Supercomputing Challenge. EPCC has taken part in the past with great success and we're returning to the competition at ISC17 with a strong team of students from our MSc in High Performance Computing, and MSc in High Performance Computing with Data Science.

When we parallelise and optimise computational simulation codes we always have choices to make. Choices about the type of parallel model to use (distributed memory, shared memory, PGAS, single sided, etc), whether the algorithm used needs to be changed, what parallel functionality to use (loop parallelisation, blocking or non-blocking communications, collective or point-to-point messages, etc).