HPC for industry

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. 

We support businesses across a wide range of industries and sectors. 

We recently completed a successful collaboration with Oil and Gas integrity management specialists, PIM Ltd, to investigate the benefits and opportunities for using novel automation and data analytics technologies to improve the effectiveness and productivity of asset integrity management services. Over the last eight years PIM has delivered risk-based inspection services to the Oil and Gas sector and has built up a considerable amount of data which can be leveraged to optimise future inspection services.

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. A Service Platform (including training, access to codes and software, and expert consultation) will be offered within EXCELLERAT where participants will be provided with the most suitable type of support, based on their own current needs.

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.