Summer of HPC 2017 at EPCC
17 January 2017
PRACE’s Summer of HPC programme has been running for quite a few years now. Each year around twenty students from universities across Europe travel to different countries to spend eight weeks at an HPC centre, working on a project with a mentor.
These projects are very varied and often, but not always, include some visualisation component. Having been a mentor for the past four years, I have seen some really fantastic work from my own students and others on the programme, and many students go on to focus their studies on HPC and/or even work in the field of HPC.
This year SoHPC is running again, the list of projects has just been released and student applications are open. Students will apply to specific projects and once again we will host three summer students here at EPCC. I think we have three really interesting project proposals which represent some of the state of the art in HPC.
SoHPC projects at EPCC
Andy Turner has proposed a project looking at ARCHER usage data in detail. Not only do we have current anonymised data but also historical data going back to the time of previous HPC machines. Whilst some simple analysis is currently done and published on the ARCHER website, the aim of this project will be to drill down further, enable more detailed analysis of how people are using these machines and also potentially how usage has changed over the years. There are very many ways in which the data can be analysed and visualised, and inevitably there will be some fascinating trends waiting to be found!
Find out more Online visualisation of current and historic supercomputer usage
Amy Krause, who has been a mentor for the past couple of years, will host a student looking at real-time earthquake modelling. In collaboration with the British Geological Survey, the student will be investigating building an environment where data from earthquakes can be fed in and then aftershocks predicted and the accuracy of the calculations validated. The societal impact of this project is especially important as having accurate modelling environments that decision makers know they can trust has an inevitable impact on policy and helping those in affected areas.
Find out more Development and validation of real-time earthquake hazard models
And I will host a student looking at developing an interactive weather forecasting educational tool. This builds upon the work done by my 2016 SoHPC student, Tomislav, who developed an interactive weather forecasting outreach demo. As we have used and experimented with this, we realised that the approach can also have very useful applications in teaching the fundamentals of weather science, computational methods and HPC in general. This project will therefore focus on extending the existing outreach demo to target it towards undergraduate and early postgraduate education. The SoHPC student will be able to experiment with different ways in which the simulations can be set up and then physically see the impact this has on both the accuracy of the forecast and also performance of the model.
Find out more Interactive weather forecasting on supercomputers as a tool for education
If you are an undergraduate or early postgraduate student then take a look at all the different SoHPC 2017 project proposals and see if one grabs you. Regardless, keep track of this and the SoHPC blog during the summer where regular updates will be posted.
The programme will run from 1 July to 31 August 2017. Applications close on 19 February 2017.