HPC for industry

Illuminate, a commercial collaborator of EPCC, has a mission to accelerate informed decisions by providing their customers with the means to find specific needle in a haystack data points from the mass of their network traffic. As networks evolve, they are continuously innovating to ensure that their data pipelines operate at maximum efficiency.

Data analytics pipelines have three main functions: data ingestion, processing, and analysis. The data ingestion stage focuses on obtaining or extracting data from a range of data sources and importing it into systems that can enable processing and analysis. This is followed by data processing to validate, transform and enrich it, and load it into some form of queryable data storage, such as a data lake. Finally, we utilise Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning processes to build models from the data in the lake and use them to gain insight.

The European Commission has launched a network of National Centres of Excellence in High-Performance Computing (HPC), High-Performance Data Analytics (HPDA) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). The UK centre will be delivered jointly by EPCC and the Hartree Centre.

EPCC is a partner in the EXCELLERAT project, a single point of access for expertise on how data management, data analytics, visualisation, simulation-driven design and Co-design with high-performance computing (HPC) can benefit engineering, especially in the aeronautics, automotive, energy and manufacturing sectors.

Work on the Edinburgh International Data Facility has passed three key milestones, bringing the infrastructure that will underpin the £600m Data-Driven Innovation Programme significantly closer to reality.

Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, EIDF’s home, Computer Room 4 (cr4) at the University’s Advanced Computing Facility, completed its main construction phase at the end of the third quarter of 2020 and cr4 has entered its commissioning and fit-out phase.  If everything goes to plan, we will start to build infrastructure in the room from January 2021.

EPCC continues to support industry in these challenging times, leveraging our three key foundations:

• The hosting, provision and management of high-performance computing (HPC) and data facilities for academia and business.
• Research and project support to optimise the computing activities of those organisations.
• Our unique project-based Applications Group, which provides bespoke novel and high-performance software solutions to academia, industry and commerce.

During the past year EPCC has increased its engagement with the Machine Intelligence Garage, a UK Government programme that supports innovative startups which make use of machine-learning techniques and artificial intelligence (AI).

Part of the Machine Intelligence Garage's remit is to enable technical support, such as HPC services, which is provided by various partners. For example, its industrial partners include AWS, Google Cloud, and NVIDIA. EPCC is a founding partner and we also offer support and potential collaboration for interested startups.

Cirrus is a Tier-2 state-of-the-art advanced computing facility available to industry and academia. Hosted and managed by EPCC, it provides an ideal platform for solving computational, simulation, modelling, and data science challenges. 

The system was recently upgraded via a £3.5m funding award from the UK's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. This included the addition of 144 NVIDIA V100 GPUs and a 256TB high-performance storage layer for the most demanding data-streaming applications. 

In June, a unique collaboration between the University of Edinburgh, the Financial Data and Technology Association, and Fintech Scotland was awarded £22.5m from UK Government to harness financial data for societal and economic benefit. The Global Open Finance Centre of Excellence (GOFCoE) will be an independent collaboration between governments and regulators, the financial services, industry and academia. 

EPCC is a partner in the EXCELLERAT programme, which brings together key players from industry, research and HPC to provide services that will enable the European engineering industry to advance towards Exascale technologies.

There are great opportunities for engineering applications in exploiting Exascale computing. EXCELLERAT brings together expertise in HPC and engineering software to support the development of applications that can exploit computing capability at this level. 

EPCC has collaborated with Intel® and Illuminate Technologies to investigate innovative performance-enhancing, packet-processing approaches within the type of Cloud environment expected to be seen in 5G deployments.