EPCC News 89

July 2021

Opening up new frontiers in data and HPC

From our Director

Wherever you work or live, I do not think any of us realised in March 2020 that life would not have returned to normal by summer 2021.

As I write this, the vast majority of EPCC staff are still working from home and have been now for sixteen months. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone in EPCC, not just for coping, but in many cases going well beyond their role to keep our systems and projects running as well as we could throughout the pandemic.

As with all organisations, there have been many challenges along the way but hopefully we are starting to see the beginning of the end. Over the autumn, we will begin returning to our offices in the Bayes Centre and start to bring a full complement of staff back to our data centre (which has remained open throughout).

In parallel, we hope to see the end to the problems we have witnessed with the ARCHER2 system and finally begin to deliver its potential to the EPSRC and NERC computational science communities.

Within this newsletter you will find a taste of the huge number of activities we’ve managed to undertake despite the pandemic. I hope you enjoy reading it and we look forward to seeing people in person again over the coming months.

Mark Parsons,

EPCC Director