EPCC collaborates with a wide range of academic research groups across all areas of science, including engineering, mathematics, medicine, humanities and social sciences. Our role typically focuses on providing the HPC and software development expertise and our involvement in projects can be at any stage of the research process, from developing new algorithms and techniques through to writing efficient software. We also specialize in enabling and optimizing software for performance on parallel systems, allowing researchers to exploit the power of the latest HPC technologies to further their work.

Example Projects

  • Evolutionary Biology

    This 3-year collaborative project with the Institute of Evolutionary Biology, School of Biological Sciences at the University of Edinburgh, investigates the key genetic changes that determine the virulence of the influenza virus. EPCC supports the group by making two different types of modelling approaches available on the Blue Gene system, namely Bayesian graphical modelling and agent-based modelling. This involves porting existing software and developing parallelisation strategies, as well as applying machine-specific optimisations in order to exploit the capabilities of the hardware.

  • HECToR

    HECToR is the UK’s main national supercomputing service and it is hosted and managed by EPCC. The system - which is used to facilitate world-leading research in a wide range of disciplines - has a theoretical peak performance of 208 Tflops. 

    EPCC works closely with HECToR users to ensure their codes run as efficiently as possible on the resources available. Examples include dramatic improvements to the CP2K Quantum Chemistry code - allowing it to take advantage of a larger fraction of the available resource than previously possible and substantial improvements to the mechanisms used by the NEMO Ocean Modelling code in handling the reading and writing of files on a system as large and complex as HECToR. HECToR is also part of the DEISA HPC initiative which provides leading scientific users with transparent access to a European-wide pool of supecomputing resources.

  • HPCGAP

    The HPCGAP project aims to re-engineer software used for solving mathematical problems related to discrete algebra. This work will allow it to run efficiently on multicore and HPC systems, and so enable it to address more challenging current and future research problems. EPCC’s involvement will focus on parallelising GAP (Groups, Algebras and Programming), a computational discrete algebra package which is developed and maintained by St Andrews University. 

    EPCC’s main activities will include: managing the software development process; shared-memory parallelisation of the GAP kernel; development of GAP bindings for MPI functions and shared-memory parallelisation of GAP library functions.

  • Software Sustainability Institute

    The Software Sustainability Institute is a national facility for the users and developers
    of research software. It is led by EPCC in collaboration with the universities of
    Manchester and Southampton.

    EPCC provides specialist software engineering expertise to drive the continued
    improvement and impact of research software through a series of projects in partnership
    with key research groups in the UK. EPCC staff work on impact projects with these groups
    to improve the maintenance, quality and usability of existing software, as well as
    developing publicly available tools and disseminating best practice to improve the
    process of sustainable software development.

    For further information, contact Neil Chue Hong: N.ChueHong@epcc.ed.ac.uk

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