EPCC

With my Software Sustainability Institute hat on, I recently participated in a back-to-back Data Carpentry and Software Carpentry course sponsored by the University's Research Data Service here at the University of Edinburgh. The courses were held in the main University library in a gorgeous room with a glass wall, providing a rather distracting view of the Meadows parkland. 

Over the last 10 years, the growth in performance of HPC systems has come largely from increasing core counts, which poses a question of application developers and users – how to best make use of the parallelism on offer?

This week I have been at the FEAT (Future Emerging Art and Technology) workshop in Vienna, which aims to promote collaboration between scientists and artists. As I am sure many people will be aware, the EU-funded Future and Emerging Technology (FET) programme consists of scientific projects looking to push the boundaries of research in specific fields.

I'm firmly of the opinion that one of the best ways to understand how computers work is to get hands-on with hardware. Many of us will have at some point come across a block diagram of a computer - maybe something like the one on the right.  That's all well and good, but there's something about physically taking something to bits and putting it back together that helps you understand how everything fits together.  

With that in mind, over the last year I've been helping develop a STEM outreach activity based on the idea of building PCs.  We first trialled it at Bang Goes The Borders 2015, and ran a workshop at the Edinburgh International Science Festival earlier this year, and kids as young as 5 have been able to successfully get a PC running from scratch.

EPCC staff have enthusiastically engaged with the ‘Love to Ride, Edinburgh’ cycling challenge. This is an effort to get more people to cycle within Edinburgh for environmental and health reasons through fun workplace competitions. Workplaces compete in a league based on the number of staff and EPCC is currently topping the departmental league (50-199 staff) .

Day five of the Big Bang Fair, our busiest day yet and Mario left us to return back to Edinburgh. The previous evening we all attended the supporter’s dinner, where the Young Scientist and Young Engineer of the year were announced. It was followed by a three course sit down dinner with people from industry, the exhibitors and other guests.

Lancaster University, 7-8 April 2016

The programme for the HPC-CORE (High Performance Computing-based Computational fluid dynamics for Offshore Renewable Energy) workshop has now been published. This event brings together scientific specialists from Engineering, Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences, and HPC experts to discuss the state of the art for simulation software, and the leading-edge simulations being undertaken with such software.

SHAPE is a pan-European programme that supports HPC adoption by SMEs (small to medium sized enterprises).

One of the projects I'm currently leading at EPCC is ExTASY, which is building an 'Extensible Toolkit for Advanced Sampling and analYsis'.  I've blogged in the past about the goals of the project, and the painful process leading up to our first public release. As the project is now well into its final year, we are turning our attention to community outreach - showing off what we have built to the biomolecular simulation community and getting their feedback.

A recent MSc project at EPCC has paved the way for improved diagnosis of eye-related conditions.