Building research collaborations across Europe

In just 17 months EPCC has supported 50 HPC-Europa visits from research groups in a total of 15 countries. We are already seeing great results from our visitors, including at least seven publications.

Applications for repeat or reciprocal visits – either between the same researchers, or different members of the same groups – are testimony to the strength of the ongoing collaborative links fostered by the programme. Two of our first HPC-Europa3 visitors have even returned to their former host research groups for longer visits.

Theoretical chemist Mats Simmermacher visited Dr Adam Kirrander (School of Chemistry, University of Edinburgh) last year to work on quantum simulations of ultrafast scattering experiments that use X-ray Free-Electron Lasers. His visit led to him securing his current one-year post as Lecturer in Chemical Physics at the School.

Mats is the joint author of a recent paper in the prestigious Physical Review Letters. This paper, “Electronic Coherence in Ultrafast X-Ray Scattering from Molecular Wave Packets”, is based on simulations that Mats ran on ARCHER, the UK’s national supercomputing sevice, which is hosted by EPCC.

Javier Gallego Sanchez (Software and Computing Systems, University of Alicante) visited Prof. Bob Fisher (School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh) to work on a project to detect floating objects in the sea using aerial images with deep learning. This work focused on two methods – one for detecting oil spills, the other for locating people (eg who have fallen overboard or been shipwrecked) – and led to two joint publications between Javier and his host (Detection of bodies in maritime rescue operations using unmanned aerial vehicles with multispectral cameras and Segmentation of Oil Spills on Side-Looking Airborne Radar Imagery with Autoencoders).

Javier has now returned to Prof. Fisher’s group for another six months, with funding from the Spanish Government’s Centre for Industrial Technological Development. He continues to work on the oil spill detection system, and on a new project to develop a system to detect branches on a bush, to allow pruning by a robot.

HPC-Europa3 project directory: http://bit.ly/EPCCNewsSummer19

Next closing date

The next closing date for HPC-Europa3 is 19th September. See:

http://www.hpc-europa.org

http://www.twitter.com/HPCEuropa3

staff@hpc-europa.org(link sends e-mail)

EPCC is one of nine European centres offering visits through the HPC-Europa programme, giving academic and industrial researchers access to world-class HPC systems, and scientific collaboration with host researchers in any field. The programme is funded by  the European Commission.