Blog
INDY hosts MATLAB® and Simulink® computational modelling facility.
Author: George GrahamPosted: 3 Jun 2013 | 09:42
A joint effort between MathWorks and EPCC has successfully demonstrated cloud-like access to MathWork’s modelling suite on INDY, EPCC's HPC cluster targeted at industrial users. Users can now readily scale-up their computationally intensive MATLAB® programs and Simulink® models. The complete MathWork’s software suite, including MATLAB®, Parallel Computing Toolbox™(MPCT) and Distributed Compute Server™(MDCS) has been installed.
iCORDI at EGU2013
Author: Mark FilipiakPosted: 31 May 2013 | 09:08
Austria Center, Vienna (© IAKW-AG / Marius Höfinger)
This year’s European Geophysical Union General Assembly (EGU2013) was held last month at the Austria Center in Vienna. About 11,000 participants come together from all fields in Earth science: seismology, oceanography, geology, meteorology, planetology… you name it, it’s there. So, lots of parallel sessions. I gave a presentation on iCORDI and the RDA at two sessions: ‘ICT-based hydrometeorology science and natural disaster societal impact assessment’ and ‘Marine Data Management’.
File transfer technologies for HPC systems
Author: Stephen BoothPosted: 28 May 2013 | 14:32
Introduction
While a surprisingly high proportion of HPC users are happy to keep their data on a single HPC service, or at most to move it within the hosting institution, sometimes is becomes necessary to move large volumes of data between different sites and institutions. As anyone who has ever tried to support users in this endeavour knows, it can be much harder to get good performance than it should be. This post is an attempt to document the available tools and technologies as well as common problems and bottlenecks.
Simulation code usage on HECToR
Author: Andy TurnerPosted: 24 May 2013 | 16:00
What sort of research is the HECToR supercomputing facility used for and what simulation software does it make use of?
EPCC measures the use of different simulation codes used on the HECToR facility to get an idea of which codes are used most and what size of jobs different code are used for. In this post I will take a look at which codes are used most on the facility and speculate whether we can infer anything from the patterns we see.
Software optimisation papers for SC13
Author: Adrian JacksonPosted: 23 May 2013 | 17:00
I've just finished working on two papers for this year's Supercomputing conference, SC13, which is going to be in Denver, Colorado, from the 17th-22nd November. EPCC will have an official presence, with an EPCC booth on the exhibition floor and a number of staff participating in the technical and education programmes. I thought this a good opportunity to write up some recent work I've been undertaking.
PATC Computational Chemistry Spring School @ CSC Helsinki
Author: Arno ProemePosted: 20 May 2013 | 17:43
The CSC (IT Center for Science) in Helsinki could be said to be EPCC's equivalent in Finland, at least when it comes to the provision and support of high-performance computing services to academia and industry.
To embrace diversity, should everyone be treated equally?
Author: Toni CollisPosted: 17 May 2013 | 14:52
In EPCC, as a mixture of mainly scientists and software developers, we are acutely aware of the gender imbalance in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines and of the low level of academic progression for women. EPCC is part of the School of Physics & Astronomy at Edinburgh, and therefore we are involved in the Institute of Physics' Juno Project, for which the School currently holds Juno Practitioner Status. However, as we progress and try to encourage diversity among our staff, we encounter issues with positive discrimination and changing behaviours.
If we value software, we need "a fundamental sea-change" in academia
Author: Simon HettrickPosted: 17 May 2013 | 09:26
Combining the skills of a scientific researcher and a software developer, the research software engineer is ideally placed to bring scientific software up to scratch. An ongoing discussion that began at the Collaborations Workshop asks what obstacles need to be removed to clear the way.
Software Carpentry @ Oxford DTC
Author: Mario AntoniolettiPosted: 14 May 2013 | 09:35
Wearing my Software Sustainability Institute (SSI) hat I participated as an instructor in a Software Carpentry bootcamp that took place on the 9th and 10th of May in Oxford. The bootcamp was organised by Jonathan Cooper and targeted at researchers involved in the Oxford Doctoral Training Centre. Shoaib Sufi from the SSI was the other instructor at this event. The three of us taught about 30 attendees from various disciplines studying for DPhils (this being Oxford) as well as some Postdocs, giving them some basic computing skills that we hope will make their research more productive.
Data decomposition reshape library
Author: Stephen BoothPosted: 10 May 2013 | 10:00
In my previous blog post I said that I was working on a library to move data between different data decompositions.
In many cases it is easier for a programmer to work with a global coordinate system that reflects the overall data in the program. This is the approach taken by many PGAS languages and some parallel libraries such as BLACS.
The programmer still wants to be in control over the data decomposition, but ideally this should be a separated concern than can be changed without forcing a complete rewrite of the rest of the program.
