EPCC News 90

Director's Welcome

As some, but not all, normality returns to our lives, it’s been a great pleasure over the past few months to begin to meet EPCC staff and even welcome some visitors to the Bayes Centre in person.

While we have not yet returned en masse to our offices, around 50% of the team have returned for a few days and on most days the office is now 25% full. It’s been a great pleasure to have meetings in person again – online meetings are not a real substitute. Of course our data centre, the Advanced Computing Facility (ACF), has been open throughout the pandemic and I want to take the opportunity to thank everyone who has made this possible, and more importantly safe!

As I hope you will see in this edition of EPCC News, we continue to go from strength to strength with around 115 staff and some new people still to join. This growth has been driven by both the increase in services we are operating – ARCHER2, Cirrus, Tesseract, Tursa, the EIDF etc – but also an increase in the number of data science projects we are involved in.

The original promise of the City Deal’s Data Driven Innovation programme is leading to a big growth in such projects. We’re also continuing to prepare for the future with new services such as the Cerebras CS-1 system, and more exploratory systems such as the FPGA testbed for the ExCALIBUR project. Most recently we’ve run a small initial Request For Information to help us prepare the ACF’s Computer Room 4 for an Exascale supercomputer service in the future – more on that in future newsletters.

I hope you enjoy this issue and any feedback is always welcome.

Professor Mark Parsons

EPCC Director