Computing Insight UK: lots of computing, insights, and nice to be back meeting in person!
10 February 2022
The annual Computing Insight UK (CIUK) conference focuses on the UK’s contribution to HPC. Held in Manchester over two days and with players from across UK academia and industry, it was a great opportunity to hear about new trends and technologies, and catch up with old friends (especially after being locked down for almost two years!)
EPCC had a booth at CIUK, with EPCC's Oliver Brown and Juan Rodriguez Herrera doing a fantastic job of staffing it throughout the event. There were numerous questions and interesting discussions on the booth, ranging from our MSc courses in HPC and HPC with data science, to the newly-commissioned ARCHER2 system, and some of the exciting workloads that are already benefiting from the power that it delivers.
The main attraction of CIUK is the technical programme, which comprised a wide range of talks. The theme this year was heterogeneous computing and its role in HPC, with many of the speakers describing success stories and their experiences of using such approaches in their own institutions or codes.
EPCC contributed two main presentations to the programme. First EPCC Director Mark Parsons talked about the UK’s Exascale project and how it is laying the foundation for an Exascale supercomputer in the UK. The strategic importance of this work was described in detail, and I think many in the audience obtained a much clearer idea and potential roadmap for future UK endeavours in the Exascale. The talk was concluded by an interesting challenge to make supercomputing greener, with Mark sharing some exciting plans that EPCC has about this. To find out more, see the video of his talk: https://www.scd.stfc.ac.uk/SiteAssets/Pages/CIUK-2021-PROGRAMME/CIUK2021_Day2_MarkParsons.m4v
The other technical talk was given by myself. I described the role of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) in accelerating HPC workloads. Considering the conference theme of heterogeneous computing this topic was topical, however FPGAs are yet to gain popularity for HPC workloads although there is some exciting progress being made in this regard. I described where I consider these architectures will contribute in accelerating future Exascale workloads and also gave a flavour of how one must rethink their algorithm to obtain best performance on the technology. Much of this presentation was based upon work undertaken by EPCC in the EXCELLERAT CoE and using the EXCALIBUR H&ES FPGA testbed. It can be watched online at https://www.scd.stfc.ac.uk/SiteAssets/Pages/CIUK-2021-PROGRAMME/CIUK2021_Day2_NickBrown.m4v , with my talk concluding by offering those in the audience access to the testbed in order to explore porting their own scientific or engineering codes to FPGAs.
I really enjoyed CIUK this year, and the talks were all the more interesting and engaging because they were delivered in person rather than over Zoom! But to some extent that’s probably unfair as irrespective the presentations were all at a very high standard, especially as we were able to catch the speaker afterwards and chat about questions over coffee!
