HPC for industry

The SHAPE programme, led by EPCC, has helped over 40 companies across Europe to get a foot on the HPC ladder, with benefits including reduced costs and faster time to market.

SHAPE was set up to raise awareness of high-performance computing (HPC) among European SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises) and to provide them with the expertise required to take advantage of the innovation possibilities created by HPC. The ultimate aim of the programme is to increase the competitiveness of SMEs in Europe.

Optos is a leading provider of medical products and services to eyecare professionals. A collaboration between Optos, EPCC, and Intel has led to significant improvement in the performance of a software algorithm used in a product under development by the company.

The project set out to identify a suitably priced Intel multicore processor on which to run the company’s code, and to accelerate an important Optos machine-learning code. The project baseline was Optos code running on a specific Intel chip and the target was to reduce its runtime to below 12 seconds on the preferred chip.

EPCC has been working closely with Edinburgh-based fintech company Sustainably, supporting its rapid growth in the charitable giving sector. Here Loral Quinn, Co-founder and CEO at Sustainably, describes our collaboration.

Sustainably is disrupting a $400 billion market by making it easier for businesses and consumers to have a positive impact every day by rounding up cashless transactions and donating spare change to causes they care about automatically every time they shop.

EPCC is providing ongoing technical support to Edinburgh-based property management company DJ Alexander as it expands across the UK in conjunction with the release of its revolutionary software platform, Apropos. It has been very rewarding to work with DJ Alexander, helping them develop a software solution that facilitates rather than constrains their expansion and helps contribute to their continued success.

EPCC has joined with other European HPC centres and engineering experts to form EXCELLERAT, the European Centre of Excellence for Engineering Applications.

Engineering applications will be among the first to exploit Exascale computing (more than 1018 operations per second). This will be the case not only in academia but also industry, with engineering judged to have the biggest potential for Exascale in the industrial field. EXCELLERAT will bring together expertise in high performance computing and engineering software to support the development of applications capable of exploiting Exascale computing.

The blog post below is based on the abstract of a talk at the PASC mini-symposium 'Modelling Cloud Physics: Preparing for Exascale' (Zurich, 13 June 2019).

The Met Office NERC Cloud model (MONC) is an atmospheric model used throughout the weather and climate community to study clouds and turbulent flows. This is often coupled with the CASIM microphysics model, which provides the capability to investigate interactions at the millimetre scale and study the formation and development of moisture. One of the main targets of these models is the problem of fog, which is very hard to model due to the high resolution required – for context the main UK weather forecast resolves to 1km, whereas the fog problem requires 1metre or less.

EPCC is at the heart of the Data Driven Innovation programme of  the Edinburgh and South East Scotland City Region Deal. This £661m programme will lead to the creation of major new data services for Scottish business, with EPCC providing the World Class Data Infrastructure (WCDI) that will underpin it.

Last week we hosted an event to explain the enormous potential of data-driven innovation for industry and to show how companies are already using data technologies to enhance commercial performance.

The Fortissimo 2 project ended on 31 December 2018. Together with its predecessor (the plain old 'Fortissimo project') it has helped over 100 SMEs and mid-caps to run experiments that demonstrate the effectiveness of providing HPC services using a business model derived from cloud computing, thereby making it much lower risk for small companies to use HPC. 

Earlier this year, HPE announced the Catalyst UK programme: a collaboration with Arm, SUSE and three UK universities to deploy one of the largest Arm-based high performance computing (HPC) installations in the world. EPCC was chosen as the site for one of these systems; the other two are the Universities of Bristol and Leicester.

EPCC's system (called 'Fulhame' after pioneering chemist Elizabeth Fulhame) was delivered and installed in early December. This HPE Apollo 70-based system consists of 64 compute nodes with two 32-core Cavium ThunderX2 processors (ie 4096 cores in total), 128GB of memory composed of 16 DDR4 DIMMs, and Mellanox InfiniBand interconnects. It will be made available to both industry and academia, with the aim to build applications that drive economic growth and productivity as outlined in the UK government’s Industrial Strategy.

In February EPCC will host an event to explain why data driven innovation is important for industry. We will also showcase how companies are already using data technologies to enhance commercial performance.

There is a lot of hype around big data and big computing for business, but it is undeniable that the influence of data-driven innovation will be profound.

The expertise and support available in Scotland has created a massive opportunity for our engineering and manufacturing sectors and, with the launch of the £500m Data-Driven Innovation (DDI) strand of the Edinburgh and South-East Scotland City Region Deal, this is an exciting time for exploring how technology can benefit business.