HPC for industry

The Met Office relies on some of the world’s most computationally intensive codes and works to very tight time constraints. It is important to explore and understand any technology that can potentially accelerate its codes, ultimately modelling the atmosphere and forecasting the weather more rapidly.

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) provide a large number of configurable logic blocks sitting within a sea of configurable interconnect. It has recently become easier for developers to convert their algorithms to configure these fundamental components and so execute their HPC codes in hardware rather than software. This has significant potential benefits for both performance and energy usage, but as FPGAs are so different from CPUs or GPUs, a key challenge is how we design our algorithms to leverage them.

Cognitive Geology Ltd is an independent technology company based in Edinburgh, UK. It delivers innovative geological modelling software to the oil and gas industry, with the goal of improving efficiency and reducing uncertainty in geological modelling workflows and the business decisions which are based on them. EPCC has worked with the company to investigate ways to reduce large ensembles of geological models while maintaining the range of plausible scenarios described by the set.

The European Centre of Excellence for Engineering Applications (EXCELLERAT) has spent its first year identifying the major challenges that must be overcome to reach Exascale performance for a set of reference applications.

There are great opportunities for engineering applications in exploiting exascale computing (that is, more than 1018 operations per second). This will be the case not only in academia but also industry: engineering is seen as having the biggest potential for exascale in the industrial field. EXCELLERAT brings together expertise in HPC and engineering software to support the development of applications that can exploit computing capability at this level.

ENGYS is a global computer software company specialising in the development and distribution of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and design optimisation solutions for enterprises based on open-source technologies. The company’s software products include HELYX, a general-purpose CFD and design optimisation package for engineering applications, and ELEMENTS, a dedicated computer simulation software for automotive design.

Illuminate Technologies works with EPCC and Intel® on a collaborative project funded by Scottish Enterprise under the CodeOpt Scotland programme to actively seek out innovative performance-enhancing, packet-processing approaches within the type of Cloud environment expected to be seen in 5G deployments.

On 14 November 2019, EPCC hosted the workshop ‘Reducing Barriers to HPC Adoption for SMEs’. Held in the University of Edinburgh’s Bayes Centre, the one-day meeting’s aim was to increase awareness of the benefits of high-performance computing (HPC) use among European small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), in particular of the gateway offered to them through the HPC-Europa3 programme. In total twenty-six representatives from ten SMEs and three HPC-Europa3 centres attended.

14 November, Bayes Centre, Edinburgh

Here at EPCC we are gearing up for the HPC-Europa3 workshop for SMEs. This event will explain the funding available to support visits by EU experts in high performance computing to Scottish/UK SMEs (and vice versa), and also for access to major computing resources for large-scale simulations and/or data analytics.

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.