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HECToR upgrade: Cray signs contract to upgrade and expand the Cray XE6 supercomputer at EPCC
Cray has announced the details of the next upgrade to HECToR, the UK’s national supercomputing service.
£4.2 million grant ensures a sustainable future for software
Software was highlighted as a key facility needed for high quality research by a recent Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) consultation. A sustained future for this valuable resource has now been assured thanks to a £4.2 million grant from EPSRC, which will establish the UK’s Software Sustainability Institute (SSI).
EPCC at the University of Edinburgh will lead a team of academics and software engineers based at the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science and the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester. The groups will work in partnership with the research community to manage software beyond the lifetime of its original funding, so that it is strengthened, adapted and customised to maximise its value to future generations of researchers.
“The issue at the moment is that there are no co-ordinated ways of sustaining important research software once it comes to the end of its funding,” said Neil Chue Hong, Director of the SSI and OMII-UK. “Some software gets abandoned when the project ends. Some systems are maintained in pockets on very much a best-effort basis rather than on the basis of any longer term strategy.”
Mr Chue Hong and his collaborators will work with 30-40 groups across the UK, providing the expertise needed to create self-sustaining communities of researchers around important software. It is these communities that will ensure the software’s future by keeping it up-to-date and developing it to meet new requirements. A wide range of disciplines are set to benefit from the SSI’s work, with early projects encompassing climate change, nuclear fusion and medical imaging.
The SSI will collaborate with key researchers to identify and shape the software which is considered by its community to be the most important for research. Strategies for sustaining software will be optimised, and the best methods will be communicated to researchers through SSI consultancy. This work will help to stop the decay of software. “The creation of the SSI will ensure that important software is sustained so that it can continue to contribute towards high quality research” said Mr Chue Hong.
Notes to Editors
1. For further information about OMII-UK, please visit: www.omii.ac.uk
2. Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) is the main UK government agency for funding research and training in engineering and the physical sciences, investing more than £850 million a year in a broad range of subjects – from mathematics to materials science, and from information technology to structural engineering. www.epsrc.ac.uk
3. With around 500 researchers, and 900 undergraduate students, the School of Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton is one of the world’s largest and most successful integrated research groupings, covering Computer Science, Software Engineering, Electronics, Electrical Engineering, and IT in Organisations. ECS has unrivalled depth and breadth of expertise in world-leading research, new developments and their applications.
4. The University of Southampton is a leading UK teaching and research institution with a global reputation for research and scholarship across a wide range of subjects in engineering, science, social sciences, health, arts and humanities.
With over 22,000 students, around 5000 staff, and an annual turnover of almost £400 million, the University of Southampton is one of the country’s top institutions for engineering, computer science and medicine. We combine academic excellence with an innovative and entrepreneurial approach to research, supporting a culture that engages and challenges students and staff in their pursuit of learning.
The University is also home to a number of world-leading research centres, including the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, the Institute of Sound and Vibration Research, the Optoelectronics Research Centre, the Centre for the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease, and the Southampton Statistical Sciences Research Institute
5. The University of Manchester is Britain’s largest single-site university with a proud history of achievement and an ambitious agenda for the future. It is a member of the Russell Group, was ranked with the elite group of research universities traditionally formed by the triangle of Oxford, Cambridge and London in the recent Research Assessment Exercise 2008, and home to the longest established school of Computer Science in the UK. Its external research income is £263 million. Further information: www.man.ac.uk
6. Established in 1583, the University of Edinburgh is one of the UK’s most important and historic Higher Education institutions. World renowned for its research and teaching, it is a member of the prestigious Russell Group, an association of the UK’s 20 major research intensive universities. Student numbers currently stand at over 23,000 and the University employs more than 7,000 staff. Further information: www.ed.ac.uk
7. EPCC, based within the University of Edinburgh, is the leading computational science technology transfer centre in Europe. Founded in 1990, EPCC’s mission is to accelerate the effective exploitation of novel computing solutions throughout academia, industry and commerce. Through UoE HPCx Ltd, it holds the contract to provide the UK’s national supercomputer service, HECToR. Further information: www.epcc.ed.ac.uk
For further information contact:
Neil Chue Hong, Director of SSI and OMII-UK, Tel: +44(0)23 8059 8862,
email: N.ChueHong@omii.ac.uk
Dr Mark Parsons, EPCC Commercial Directror, Tel: +44(0)131 650 5022, email: M.Parsons@epcc.ed.ac.uk
Joyce Lewis, Communications Manager, School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton (tel. +44(0)23 8059 5453; email: jkl2@ecs.soton.ac.uk
HPCwire: DEISA2 Aims for Integrated European HPC Ecosystem
HPCwire features a DEISA press-release, DEISA2 Aims for Integrated European HPC Ecosystem.
Scottish supercomputer wins medal at the British Computer Society IT Awards
A unique supercomputer called ‘Maxwell’ – built in Scotland by the FHPCA with the support of Scottish Enterprise – has been recognised at this year’s prestigious British Computer Society IT Industry Awards in London.
Nominated in two categories, the FHPCA (FPGA High Performance Computing Alliance) came home with a medal having been placed runner-up for the much coveted prize of the BT Flagship Award for Innovation.
The FHPCA was established in 2004 to promote the use of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) as an alternative to microprocessors. With traditional microprocessor-based solutions hitting performance limits, there is a growing need for new technologies that address the need for ever greater processing capability without demanding large amounts of space and power.
Maxwell uses FPGAs and requires much less space and cooling than a conventional microprocessor system. It is also over 100 times more energy-efficient and up to 300 times faster.
Several Scottish companies have been using Maxwell since its launch in March this year. Impressive results have already been achieved in the oil & gas and medical imaging sectors.
One of the first companies to use the supercomputer, Aberdeen-based Offshore Hydrocarbon Mapping plc (OHM), found that its application ran significantly faster on Maxwell. OHM is the world’s leading provider of Controlled Source Electromagnetic Imaging (CSEMI) services to the offshore oil industry.
Dr Lucy MacGregor, Chief Scientific Officer of OHM, said: “Improving the performance of our data processing and visualisation services is key to our continued success and we are very excited about the code speed-ups we’ve achieved with Maxwell.”
Of course, many other sectors of industry could benefit too, particularly the financial sector. In order to demonstrate the power of FPGAs and the Maxwell system when handling Monte Carlo calculations for the investment banking sector, the Alliance decided to implement the Black-Scholes algorithm, which is commonly used to calculate future stock prices. Spectacular results were obtained. In particular the algorithm ran 320 times faster per FPGA on Maxwell compared to the equivalent algorithm running on the host PC. This demonstration of the Black-Scholes algorithm has shown the potential benefits of FPGAs to the financial sector and the Alliance is currently pursuing opportunities with several leading investment banks, some of whom have been conducting their own experiments with FPGAs.
Dr Mark Parsons, Commercial Director of EPCC said: “Maxwell has been created for businesses so that they can easily investigate FPGAs. We’ve already seen it give companies a competitive advantage. We now want more businesses to come and test their codes on Maxwell to see whether it will be useful for them too.”
Maxwell was built by the FHPCA (FPGA High Performance Computing Alliance). The Alliance is led by EPCC at the University of Edinburgh and comprises Alpha Data, Nallatech, Xilinx, Algotronix, Scottish Enterprise and the iSLI.
The BCS IT Industry Awards are the leading hallmark of success among practitioners in the IT industry today.
David Clark, BCS Chief Executive, said: “This year’s awards are a fitting culmination to our 50th anniversary year which has been exceptional. Technology has enabled unparalleled improvements in productivity and business efficiency over the last 50 years and today IT drives business. These winners have embraced this concept and proven their excellence in innovation and professionalism; they exemplify the importance and value that technology brings to business, society and the economy.”
The winners were announced on Thursday 6th December.
Contact:
Ms Tracy Peet
Marketing & Publicity Coordinator
EPCC
Tel - 0131 650 5028
NOTES:
1. Maxwell system
Named after James Clerk Maxwell, the great Scottish physicist and creator of the first colour photograph, Maxwell has achieved impressive results in all three demonstrator projects:
- Financial option pricing has been accelerated by over 300 times per node, taking less than a minute to do what used to take over four hours;
- Three-dimensional video frames can be processed at over 8 frames per second, where previously each frame took nearly 15 seconds to analyse;
- Oil and gas simulations run over 5 times faster per node than a cluster of 3 GHz Xeon processors.
Technical specification:
The system consists of a 32-way IBM BladeCentre chassis hosting 64 Xilinx Virtex-4 FPGAs directly connected over high-speed RocketIO. Maxwell differs from many FPGA-based systems in that the FPGAs are directly connected over RocketIO. This allows codes to be parallelised across the collection of FPGAs and encourages algorithms to be written such that once the data and program are loaded onto the accelerator cards the processing occurs without data being transferred again across the PCI-X bus. This approach is delivering previously unattainable performance in a surprisingly small footprint with very low energy costs.
2. FPGAs
Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are programmable semiconductor devices that are based around a matrix of configurable logic blocks connected via programmable interconnects. As opposed to normal microprocessors, where the design of the device is fixed by the manufacturer, FPGAs can be programmed to compute the exact algorithm required by a given application. This makes them very powerful and versatile.
3. FPGA High Performance Computing Alliance (FHPCA): www.fhpca.org
FHPCA bridges the gap between the numerical computing and FPGA communities. Established during 2004, it is dedicated to the use of Xilinx FPGAs to deliver new levels of computational performance for real-world industrial applications. FHPCA is led by EPCC, funded by Scottish Enterprise and builds on the skills of Nallatech Ltd, Alpha Data Ltd, Xilinx Development Corporation, Algotronix Ltd and iSLI.
4. Alpha Data: www.alpha-data.com
Established in 1993, Alpha Data is at the forefront of the new wave of reconfigurable computing and a world leader in embedded FPGA platforms. Alpha Data is headquartered in the UK with a sales office in California.
5. EPCC: www.epcc.ed.ac.uk
Founded in 1990, EPCC’s mission is to accelerate the effective exploitation of novel computing solutions throughout academia, industry and commerce. Today, EPCC is the leading computational science technology transfer centre in Europe. EPCC leads the FHPCA and provides academics and industrial users with access to the Maxwell system which is housed at the University of Edinburgh’s Advance Computing Facility (ACF).
6. Nallatech: nallatech.com
Founded in 1993, Nallatech is the world’s leading supplier of high-performance COTS FPGA Solutions. Nallatech designs and manufactures high-performance FPGA embedded products, in form factors such as PCI, VME, cPCI, PCI-X and PCI-104. Customers benefit from lower costs, reduction in size, weight and power and improved performance. Headquartered in Glasgow, Scotland, its wholly-owned subsidiary Nallatech Inc. has U.S. group offices in Baltimore and regional offices in San Jose, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Boston. Nallatech has six operating locations worldwide and international partner sales offices in seven countries.
7. iSLI: www.sli-institute.ac.uk
Founded in 1998, iSLI (the Institute for System Level Integration) provides postgraduate education, professional training and research in system level integration incorporating cross over technologies such as hardware, embedded software, MNT/MEMS. A collaboration of the computing science, informatics and electronic engineering departments of the universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Heriot-Watt and Strathclyde, and Scottish Enterprise, the Institute is the first centre of excellence in system level integration to be established worldwide. Its aim is to support the development of electronics systems design worldwide and to encourage the exploration of new technologies through research.
8. Scottish Enterprise: www.scottishenterprise.com
Scottish Enterprise is the main economic development agency for Scotland covering 93% of the population from Grampian to the Borders. The Scottish Enterprise Network consists of Scottish Enterprise and 12 Local Enterprise Companies. Working in partnership with the private and public sectors the Network aims to build more and better businesses, to develop the skills and knowledge of Scottish people, and to encourage innovation to make Scottish business internationally competitive.
9. British Computer Society: www.bcs.org
Established in 1957, the British Computer Society (BCS) is the leading body for those working in IT and has a world-wide membership of over 60,000 members in 100 countries. BCS was incorporated by Royal Charter in 1984. Its objectives are to promote the study and practice of computing and to advance knowledge of and education in IT for the benefit of the public. BCS is also a registered charity. The winners of The IT Industry Awards 2007 were announced at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London on 6th December 2007.
10. OHM: www.ohmsurveys.com
Offshore Hyrdocarbon Mapping (OHM) is the world’s leading provider of Controlled Source Electromagnetic Imaging (CSEMI) services, including surveying, data processing, and data interpretation services to the offshore oil industry. CSEMI has been used for over 20 years by researchers to examine hydrothermal and volcanic systems on mid-ocean ridges. With offices in Aberdeen, Scotland and Houston, Texas, they serve clients from around the globe in offshore locations ranging from shallow to ultra deep water. OHM’s full service CSEMI offering spans a broad range disciplines.
Scottish supercomputer nominated for two BCS IT Industry Awards
A unique supercomputer called ‘Maxwell’ – built in Scotland by the FHPCA Alliance with the support of Scottish Enterprise – is in the running for two awards at next month’s prestigious British Computer Society IT Industry Awards 2007.
The nominations recognise Maxwell’s unique combination of innovation and energy-efficiency. The categories are: Best Use of Green Technology Project Award and the BT Flagship Award for Innovation.
The FHPCA was established in 2004 to promote the use of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) as an alternative to microprocessors. With traditional microprocessor-based solutions hitting performance limits, there is a growing need for new technologies that address the demand for ever greater processing capability without demanding large amounts of space and power.
Maxwell uses FPGAs and requires much less space and cooling than a conventional microprocessor system. It is also over 100 times more energy efficient and up to 300 times faster.
Several companies have been using Maxwell since its launch in March this year. Impressive results have already been achieved in the oil & gas and medical imaging sectors.
One of the first companies to use the supercomputer, Aberdeen-based Offshore Hydrocarbon Mapping plc (OHM), found that its application ran significantly faster on Maxwell. OHM is the world’s leading provider of Controlled Source Electromagnetic Imaging (CSEMI) services to the offshore oil industry.
Dr Lucy MacGregor, Chief Scientific Officer of OHM, said: “Improving the performance of our data processing and visualisation services is key to our continued success and we are very excited about the code speed-ups we’ve achieved with Maxwell.”
Of course, many other sectors of industry could benefit too, particularly the financial sector. In order to demonstrate the power of FPGAs and the Maxwell system when handling Monte Carlo calculations for the investment banking sector, the Alliance decided to implement the Black Scholes algorithm which is commonly used to calculate future stock prices. Spectacular results were obtained. In particular, the algorithm ran 320 times faster per FPGA on Maxwell than when compared to the equivalent algorithm running on the host PC. This demonstration of the Black Scholes algorithm has shown the potential benefits of FPGAs to the financial sector and the Alliance is currently pursuing opportunities with several leading investment banks, some of whom have been conducting their own experiments with FPGAs.
Dr Mark Parsons, Commercial Director of EPCC said: “Maxwell has been created so that businesses can easily investigate FPGAs. We’ve already seen it give companies a competitive advantage. We want more businesses to come and test their codes on Maxwell to see whether it will be useful for them too.”
Maxwell was built by the FHPCA (FPGA High Performance Computing Alliance). The Alliance is led by EPCC at the University of Edinburgh and comprises Alpha Data, Nallatech, Xilinx, Algotronix, Scottish Enterprise and the iSLI.
The BCS IT Industry Awards are the leading hallmark of success among practitioners in the IT industry today.
Anna Duckworth, BCS Head of Corporate Marketing, said: “Year on year the standard of entries increases and this year is no exception with innovative projects that showcase excellence in IT. The next stage of judging will be very difficult as our expert panel endeavours to select the outright winners for each award.”
The winners will be announced on Thursday 6th December.
Ms Tracy Peet
Marketing & Publicity Coordinator
EPCC
Tel - 0131 650 5030
Email – t.peet@epcc.ed.ac.uk
NOTES
1. Maxwell system
Named after James Clerk Maxwell, the great Scottish physicist and creator of the first colour photograph, Maxwell has achieved impressive results in all three demonstrator projects:
- Financial option pricing has been accelerated by over 300 times per node, taking less than a minute to do what used to take over four hours;
- Three-dimensional video frames can be processed at over 8 frames per second, where previously each frame took nearly 15 seconds to analyse;
- Oil and gas simulations run over 5 times faster per node than a cluster of 3 GHz Xeon processors.
Technical specification:
The system consists of a 32-way IBM BladeCentre chassis hosting 64 Xilinx Virtex-4 FPGAs directly connected over high-speed RocketIO. Maxwell differs from many FPGA-based systems in that the FPGAs are directly connected over RocketIO. This allows codes to be parallelised across the collection of FPGAs and encourages algorithms to be written such that once the data and program are loaded onto the accelerator cards the processing occurs without data being transferred again across the PCI-X bus.
This approach is delivering previously unattainable performance in a surprisingly small footprint with very low energy costs.
2. FPGAs
Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are programmable semiconductor devices that are based around a matrix of configurable logic blocks connected via programmable interconnects. As opposed to normal microprocessors, where the design of the device is fixed by the manufacturer, FPGAs can be programmed to compute the exact algorithm required by a given application. This makes them very powerful and versatile.
3. FPGA High Performance Computing Alliance (FHPCA): www.fhpca.org
FHPCA bridges the gap between the numerical computing and FPGA communities. Established during 2004, it is dedicated to the use of Xilinx FPGAs to deliver new levels of computational performance for real-world industrial applications. FHPCA is led by EPCC, funded by Scottish Enterprise and builds on the skills of Nallatech Ltd, Alpha Data Ltd, Xilinx Development Corporation, Algotronix Ltd and ISLI.
4. Alpha Data: www.alpha-data.com
Established in 1993, Alpha Data is at the forefront of the new wave of reconfigurable computing and a world leader in embedded FPGA platforms. Alpha Data is headquartered in the UK with a sales office in California.
5. EPCC: www.epcc.ed.ac.uk
Founded in 1990, EPCC’s mission is to accelerate the effective exploitation of novel computing solutions throughout academia, industry and commerce. Today EPCC is the leading computational science technology transfer centre in Europe. EPCC leads the FHPCA and provides academics and industrial users with access to the Maxwell system which is housed at the University of Edinburgh’s Advanced Computing Facility (ACF).
6. Nallatech: nallatech.com
Founded in 1993, Nallatech is the world’s leading supplier of high-performance COTS FPGA Solutions. Nallatech designs and manufactures high-performance FPGA embedded products, in form factors such as PCI, VME, cPCI, PCI-X and PCI-104. Customers benefit from lower costs, reduction in size, weight and power and improved performance. Headquartered in Glasgow, Scotland, its wholly-owned subsidiary Nallatech Inc. has U.S. group offices in Baltimore and regional offices in San Jose, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Boston. Nallatech has six operating locations worldwide and international partner sales offices in seven countries.
7. iSLI: www.sli-institute.ac.uk
Founded in 1998, iSLI (the Institute for System Level Integration) provides postgraduate education, professional training and research in system level integration incorporating cross over technologies such as hardware, embedded software, MNT/MEMS. A collaboration of the computing science, informatics and electronic engineering departments of the universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Heriot-Watt and Strathclyde, and Scottish Enterprise, the Institute is the first centre of excellence in system level integration to be established worldwide. Its aim is to support the development of electronics systems design worldwide and to encourage the exploration of new technologies through research.
8. Scottish Enterprise: www.scottishenterprise.com
Scottish Enterprise is the main economic development agency for Scotland covering 93% of the population from Grampian to the Borders. The Scottish Enterprise Network consists of Scottish Enterprise and 12 Local Enterprise Companies. Working in partnership with the private and public sectors the Network aims to build more and better businesses, to develop the skills and knowledge of Scottish people, and to encourage innovation to make Scottish business internationally competitive.
9. British Computer Society: www.bcs.org
Established in 1957, the British Computer Society (BCS) is the leading body for those working in IT and has a worldwide membership of over 60,000 members in 100 countries. BCS was incorporated by Royal Charter in 1984. Its objectives are to promote the study and practice of computing and to advance knowledge of and education in IT for the benefit of the public. BCS is also a registered charity. The winners of The IT Industry Awards 2007 will be announced at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London on 6th December 2007.
10. OHM: www.ohmsurveys.com
Offshore Hyrdocarbon Mapping (OHM) is the world’s leading provider of Controlled Source Electromagnetic Imaging (CSEMI) services, including surveying, data processing, and data interpretation services to the offshore oil industry. CSEMI has been used for over 20 years by researchers to examine hydrothermal and volcanic systems on mid-ocean ridges. With offices in Aberdeen, Scotland and Houston, Texas, they serve clients from around the globe in offshore locations ranging from shallow to ultra deep water. OHM’s full service CSEMI offering spans a broad range disciplines.
OpenMP 3.0 draft available
21 October 2007
The OpenMP ARB is pleased to announce the release of a draft of Version 3.0 of the OpenMP specification for public comment. This is the first update to the OpenMP specification since 2005.
This release adds several new features to the OpenMP specification, including:
- Tasking: move beyond loops with generalized tasks and support complex and dynamic control flows.
- Loop collapse: combine nested loops automatically to expose more concurrency
- Enhanced loop schedules: Support aggressive compiler optimizations of loop schedules and give programmers better runtime control over the kind of schedule used.
- Nested parallelism support: better definition of and control over nested parallel regions, and new API routines to determine nesting structure
Larry Meadows, CEO of the OpenMP organization, states: “The creation of OpenMP 3.0 has taken very hard work by a number of people over more than two years. The introduction of a unified tasking model, allowing creation and execution of unstructured work, is a great step forward for OpenMP. It should allow the use of OpenMP on whole new classes of computing problems.”
The draft specification is available in PDF format from the Specifications section of the OpenMP ARB website:
(Direct link: http://www.openmp.org/drupal/mp-documents/spec30_draft.pdf)
Mark Bull has led the effort to expand the applicability of OpenMP while improving it for its current uses as the Chair of the OpenMP Language Committee. He states: “The OpenMP language committee has done a fine job in producing this latest version of OpenMP. It has been difficult to resolve some tricky details and understand how tasks should propagate across the language. But I think we have come up with solid solutions, and the team should be proud of their accomplishment.”
The ARB warmly welcomes any comments, corrections and suggestions you have for Version 3.0. For Version 3.0, we are soliciting comments through an on-line forum, located at http://www.openmp.org/forum. The forum is entitled Draft 3.0 Public Comment. You can also send email to feedback@openmp.org if you would rather not use the forum. It is most helpful if you can refer to the page number and line number where appropriate.
The public comment period will close on 31 January 2008.
The University at the Edinburgh International Science Festival
News Release
Issued: 30 March 2007
University adds its voice to topical Science Festival debates
The dangers associated with the internet, climate change and how to create drugs tailor made to individuals using the human genome will be some of the topics debated at the Edinburgh International Science Festival.
As part of the festival, the University of Edinburgh is running a series of talks aimed at encouraging greater public understanding of science as well as tackling controversial issues in the news.
The first talk on Tuesday (3 April) will look at the use of science to create disease-causing organisms for biomedical research, but also the dangers of science being misused to produce bioweapons in the post 9/11 world. Professor Geoffrey L Smith, of Imperial College London, will speak and Professor Malcolm Dando, of the University of Bradford, will act as chair.
On Wednesday (4 April), Dr Allen Roses, vice president of genetics at GlaxoSmithKline, will look at personalised medicine and what future developments in the field might be. His talk will be followed by an audience discussion, led by Professor Joyce Tait, of the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Social and Economic Research on Innovation and Genomics.
The following week, on Monday (9 April), Dr Dave Reay, of the University of Edinburgh’s School of Geosiences, will put the arguments against climate change to the test. On Wednesday (11 April), Dr David Shuker, an evolutionary biologist from the University of Edinburgh, will investigate conflict between the sexes in different species and how this relates to human beings.
On Thursday (12 April), Professor Peter Ghazal, from the Scottish Centre for Genomics Technology and Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, will look at how viruses may contribute beneficial genes to future generations and, on Friday (13 April), Dr DK Arvind from the University of Edinburgh’s School of Informatics will look at how ‘specks’ – computers the size of matchstick heads – are impacting on areas ranging from computer animation to healthcare.
Also on Friday, broadcaster Quentin Cooper will chair a debate on stem cell research, organised by Euro Stem Cell and the University of Edinburgh’s Institute for Stem Cell Research. Speakers include Austin Smith, of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Stem Cell Research at the University of Cambridge; Heather Cubie, director of research and development for NHS Lothian; and Alistair Newton, Secretary General of the European Federation of Neurological Associations.
On Sunday (15 April), Dr Rob Baxter, of the University of Edinburgh’s EPCC software development group, will examine the dangers of fraud, sabotage and crime associated with the internet.
During the festival, the University is also staging a series of Discover Science events at the National Museum of Scotland, where children can take part in interactive displays that include chemical experiments and code cracking.
For more details of all these events, please go to http://www.ed.ac.uk/news/scifest/
For further information, please contact
The press and PR office
Tel 0131 650 2250 or 07979 446 209.
FHPCA: FPGA supercomputer celebrates Scottish heritage
A new FPGA supercomputer named Maxwell is based on technology invented in Scotland and constructed by the FPGA High Performance Computing Alliance.
The system, built at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, uses FPGAs as an alternative to conventional microprocessors. More powerful than a conventional system of a similar sise and using ten times less power, Maxwell is delivering new levels of computational performance for real-world industrial applications.
Maxwell has been built using world-leading FPGA technology designed and manufactured by Scottish SMEs Nallatech and Alpha Data.
It uses next generation FPGAs provided by Xilinx, the world’s leading FPGA company.
Maxwell’s power has already been demonstrated by porting three numerically intensive applications from the oil and gas, financial and medical imaging sectors.
The system provides unprecedented computing power in relation to energy costs and it is anticipated that Maxwell could usher in a new generation of compact and energy-saving computers over the coming decade.
The FHPCA (FPGA High Performance Computing Alliance) has spent the past two years and GBP 3.6 million, including funding from Scottish Enterprise, developing Maxwell.
The alliance builds on Scotland’s world-class reputation and expertise in the field of high performance reconfigurable computing.
Maxwell will prove to be a valuable resource for industries with massive processing requirements such as: drug design, military defence, seismology, medical imaging, mobile telecomms, computer modelling and financial engineering.
Mark Parsons, Commercial Director of EPCC, the supercomputing centre that built Maxwell, said: ‘The FHPCA project has allowed EPCC to do what it does best: engauge with local SMEs to develop new technologies and new solutions and help them to grow their businesses’.
‘Maxwell represents a major opportunity for Scotland in this exciting technology space’.
Colin Urquhart, Chief Executive Officer of Dimensional Imaging, which originated the code used in the medical imaging demonstrator project, said: ‘Working with the FHPCA has introduced Dimensional Imaging to a new technology which offers the potential to increase dramatically the speed of our advanced image processing algorithms’.
‘In the future we expect this will enable new products and sales for the company’.
Graham Fairlie, Project Manager with Scottish Enterprise’s Enabling Technology and Engineering team, added: ‘The completion of the demonstrator applications is a significant step forward in exploiting the commercial potential of the Maxwell technology both for the benefit of the partner companies involved in the project and in Scotland’s key industries such as financial services, energy and life sciences where the high performance technology could be used to deliver significant improvements in productivity’.
‘Scottish Enterprise has played a key role in the project so far, recognising the synergies between the expertise of EPCC and the wider community with reconfigurable chip expertise’.
‘We are looking forward to the next phase of the project and continuing to work with the partners to ensure we can realise the economic potential of this technology to help grow the wider Scottish economy’.
Allan Cantle, President and Founder of Nallatech, a founding member of FHPCA, said: ‘FPGA based computing systems have been Nallatech’s core business for over a decade’.
‘We can now deliver unprecedented computational capacity, using less power in a smaller space’.
‘The FHPCA has unleashed the acceptance of FPGA technology in the HPC community and the completion of this demonstrator is a major achievement for Scotland’.
Graham Smart, Managing Director of Alpha Data, a founding member of FHPCA, added: ‘FPGAs have grown up over recent years’.
‘Dramatic improvements in density, speed and cost enable these devices to perform compute bound applications hundreds of times faster than conventional processors’.
‘FPGAs are ubiquitous in the embedded systems community, and with the Von Neumann processor running out of steam, FHPCA is perfectly poised to help the HPC community adopt this technology’.
‘Alpha Data takes care of the deployment of FPGA platforms and with FHPCA is able to offer comprehensive FPGA-based solutions to the HPC and scientific communities’.
During 2007 and 2008 FHPCA will run a series of seminars to introduce Maxwell to UK industrial sectors.
The first event will be in Edinburgh in May this year.
FHPCA: Energy-saving Supercomputer launched in Edinburgh
Press Releases
19 March 2007: The FPGA Supercomputer “Maxwell”, based on technology invented in Scotland and constructed by the FPGA High Performance Computing Alliance, is launched today. The system, built at The University of Edinburgh in Scotland, uses Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) as an alternative to conventional microprocessors. More powerful than a conventional system of a similar size and using ten times less power, Maxwell is delivering new levels of computational performance for real-world industrial applications.
Maxwell has been built using world-leading FPGA technology designed and manufactured by Scottish SMEs: Nallatech and Alpha Data. It utilises next generation FPGAs provided by Xilinx, the world’s leading FPGA company. Maxwell’s power has already been demonstrated by porting three numerically intensive applications from the oil and gas, financial and medical imaging sectors. The system provides unprecedented computing power in relation to energy costs and it is anticipated that Maxwell could usher in a new generation of compact and energy-saving computers over the coming decade.
University signs contract for supercomputer
A multi-million pound contract for a huge computer system which will benefit academic research across the whole of the UK is to be signed by staff from the University of Edinburgh today (Thursday February 22nd).
HECToR (High End Computing Terascale Resources) is a vast computing facility worth £113m over six years. The computer will be made by the American supercomputer company, Cray Inc. It has been paid for by the UK Research Councils and will be installed at the University’s Advanced Computing Facility (ACF) on the Edinburgh Technopole estate in Midlothian. It will start work in October this year and is planned to last for six years.
EPCC (Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre) at the University of Edinburgh will direct and operate the facility. EPCC’s director, Professor Arthur Trew, said:
“Traditionally progress in science has been made through theory and experiment, but an increasing range of problems now require to be simulated computationally. Examples range from climate modelling to design of new materials; from understanding sub-nuclear particles to the evolution of the Universe.
“HECToR is critical for UK scientists to compete internationally. We are delighted that EPCC has again been chosen to manage this facility. The choice of Edinburgh demonstrates the University’s leadership in the field.”
The Edinburgh-based super computer will provide UK scientists with the means to undertake increasingly complex research across a wide variety of projects, including:
: simulating the way air interacts with aircraft wings or helicopter blades.
Materials science: simulating the behaviour of materials by modelling the way their atoms interact
: including atomic physics and the physics of very hot materials
Chemistry and Biochemistry: the behaviour of complex molecules and the ways they interact
Medical applications: simulating the action of the heart, for example
Particle physics: modelling the interactions of the smallest particles of matter
: how diseases spread and die out
: modelling the way the universe develops
Ocean modelling: simulating ocean currents round the world
: long-range forecasting and climate change
: science and technology at the microscopic level
: simulating disasters and emergency response
The signing of the contract will take place on Thursday February 22nd in the Talbot Rice Gallery, University of Edinburgh, Old College, South Bridge, Edinburgh at 12.30pm.
For further information contact Professor Arthur Trew. Telephone: 0131 650 5025. A.Trew@epcc.ed.ac.uk
HECToR website: www.hector.ac.uk
Notes
1) UoE HPCX Ltd is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the University of Edinburgh. With the signing of the HECToR agreement it holds the contracts to provide both the UK’s national supercomputer services for academia. Its success is based on that of EPCC (Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre) – a computational science research and technology transfer institute within the University. Founded in 1990, EPCC’s mission is to accelerate the effective exploitation of novel computing solutions throughout academia, industry and commerce. Today, EPCC is the leading computational science technology transfer centre in Europe.
Further information: www.epcc.ed.ac.uk
2) The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) is the managing agent on behalf of all Research Councils (RCs) for the procurement of a new high-end computing facility for use by UK academic users. This service, called HECToR, is due to start in October 2007 and will have an initial theoretical peak capability of 60 Tflop/s, increasing to approximately 250 Tflop/s peak in October 2009 with a further upgrade planned for October 2011.
Further information: www.epsrc.ed.ac.uk
3) The University of Edinburgh
Established in 1583, the University of Edinburgh is one of the UK’s most important and historic Higher Education institutions. World renowned for its research and teaching, it is a member of the prestigious Russell Group, an association of the UK’s 20 major research intensive universities. Student numbers currently stand at over 24,000 and the University employs more than 7,000 staff.
Further information: www.ed.ac.uk
4) About Cray Inc.
As a global leader in supercomputing, Cray provides highly advanced supercomputers and world-class services and support to government, industry and academia. Cray technology enables scientists and engineers to achieve remarkable breakthroughs by accelerating performance, improving efficiency and extending the capabilities of their most demanding applications. Cray’s Adaptive Supercomputing vision will result in innovative next-generation products that integrate diverse processing technologies into a unified architecture, allowing customers to surpass today’s limitations and meeting the market’s continued demand for realized performance. Go to www.cray.com for more information.
HECToR: High Performance Computing Steps up Another Gear
EPSRC have signed two contracts, worth £113 million, to provide the next generation UK High End Computing service. The contracts are with UoE HPCX Ltd and NAG (Numerical Algorithms Group) Ltd. UoE HPCX Ltd is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the University of Edinburgh.
HECToR (High End Computing Terascale Resources) is the latest national high performance computing service for the UK academic community. It will provide UK scientists with the means to undertake increasingly complex computational simulations across a range of scientific disciplines including climatology, earth sciences, chemistry, materials, fluid dynamics, atomic and molecular physics, plasma physics and nanoscience. The service is expected to operate for six years and have an initial theoretical peak capability of 60 Tflop/s.
Full text of this EPSRC Press Release.
New consortium aims to give the UK a world lead in research using high performance computing
The largest ever consortium to support UK academic research using high performance computers (HPC) is being established by the University of Edinburgh, the University of Manchester and the Council for the Central Laboratories of the Research Councils’ (CCLRC) Daresbury Laboratory.
OGSA-DAI: New funding for Edinburgh Grid scientists
Edinburgh researchers involved in the creation of grid software, which links computers together across the world so their processing power can be shared, have received follow-on funding of £1.85 million
HPC-UK: New Consortium Aims To Give UK A World Lead In Research Using High Performance Computing
The largest-ever consortium to support UK academic research using high performance computers (HPC) is being established by the University of Edinburgh, the University of Manchester and the Council for the Central Laboratories of the Research Councils’ (CCLRC) Daresbury Laboratory.
IBM BlueGene: Super Computer To Tackle Science’s Most Complex Problems
Super Computer To Tackle Science’s Most Complex ProblemsA revolutionary new design of supercomputer to be installed at the University of Edinburgh will help researchers throughout Britain to tackle some of the most challenging puzzles in science. The University-based Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC), in partnership with IBM, has secured the first IBM Blue Gene supercomputer to run in Europe. It will help chemists, biologists, physicists and environmental modellers to attack complex problems that cannot be solved on existing machines.
eDIKT: Scotland leads the world in Grid-based data management with Eldas 2.0
Edikt (the e-Science Data, Information & Knowledge Transformation centre) is proud to announce the first software to use the Grid to extract information from incompatible, distributed databases.