Arno Proeme's blog

As part of our MSc Programmes, EPCC organises a yearly series of guest lectures given by external speakers from industry and academia. 

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.

The picture of a great ape cousin hoarding food at Edinburgh Zoo is deliberately misleading!  The "APES" acronym (pronounced "A-PES") actually stands for Advanced Potential Energy Surfaces, and refers to a new project that EPCC is involved in. The project in question is an NSF-EPSRC funded US-UK collaboration that aims to incorporate APES into a range of computational chemistry packages. EPCC's main contribution will be to parallelise software to take advantage of the large-scale compute resources offered by supercomputing clusters such as HECToR and its upcoming successor, ARCHER, as well as NFS-provided resources in the US. This should equip researchers with better tools to advance their understanding of the structure and function of molecules such as, hypothetically, the smell molecule isoamyl acetate (shown), which interacts with simian olfactory receptors to give bananas their irresistible allure.