November 2014

Teaching at the International Centre of Theoretical Physics, Trieste

Author: Gavin Pringle
Posted: 19 Nov 2014 | 15:42

I was recently invited to teach at an HPC School near Trieste, Italy. It was housed in The International Centre of Theoretical Physics (ICTP), which is governed by UNESCO, the International Atomic Energy Agency, and Italy, and is a UNESCO Category 1 Institute. These institutes build scientific capacity in member states, essentially in developing countries.

The HPC School, organised by Ivan Girotto et al., was part of a larger event co-sponsored by OGS, PRACE and CINECA. The HPC School had 50 students from 35 Developing Countries, including Brazil and India, as expected, but also, as examples, Costa Rica, Ethiopia, Kenya, Malaysia, Slovak Republic and Venezuela.

Nu-FuSE: An Exascale software project

Author: Adrian Jackson
Posted: 16 Nov 2014 | 23:11

The Nu-FuSE (Nuclear Fusion Simulations at Exascale) project was a 3-year, G8 funded, international research project to investigate the challenges and requirements for fusion simulations at Exascale levels. The project’s aim was to significantly improve computational modelling capabilities for fusion, and fusion-related sciences, enhancing the predictive capabilities needed to address key physics challenges of a new generation of fusion systems. 

The Auditory Project – an investigation into modelling the human ear using HPC

Author: Fiona Reid
Posted: 14 Nov 2014 | 15:12

The Auditory pilot project investigated the use of HPC to enable faster run times for computational models of the human cochlea. It was a collaboration between EPCC and Dr Michael Newton of the University of Edinburgh’s Acoustics and Audio group.

We began with an existing cochlea model code written in Matlab, which took many hours to run on a single processor. Our initial profiling of the Matlab code showed that almost the entire runtime (see Figure 1) was taken up by this solver and thus any attempts to parallelise the code would require a C/C++ replacement to be found. 

Collaboration with UK Met Office

Author: Nick Brown
Posted: 7 Nov 2014 | 15:39

We are working with the UK Met Office on a project to rewrite one of their weather forecasting models. Whilst the best known weather model is the Unified Model (UM), which generates the national and international forecast on a scale of 1km, the Met Office also has a number of other specialist models that concentrate on specific areas.  An example of this is in the study of cloud and cloud convection, in which case one often uses a Large Eddy Simulation (LES) model which handles turbulence in much more detail. 

Improving the performance of TINKER, a molecular dynamics codebase

Author: Guest blogger
Posted: 4 Nov 2014 | 10:52

Justs Zarins reports on his work to improve the performance of TINKER, a molecular dynamics codebase. This 3-month dissertation project was undertaken as part of his MSc in High Performance Computing at EPCC. Justs has now joined EPCC as a post-graduate researcher.

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