EPCC News 94

From our Director

Welcome to the Autumn 2023 edition of EPCC News. It’s difficult to believe we’ve now been based in the Bayes Centre for five years.

Despite the complexity of the move in 2018, the Bayes has proven a great building to be based in. We’ve not lost contact with the many people we continue to work with at King’s Buildings, but we’ve also met many new researchers from across the University since we moved.

EPCC goes from strength to strength. We’ve grown considerably since we moved to the Bayes and now have 135 staff, 14 PhD students, 60 on-campus MSc students and a further 60 online MSc students.

This is an exciting time for us. Having been confirmed as the hosting site for the UK’s first Exascale supercomputer, we’re in the middle of complex preparations in Computer Room 4 involving decanting all of its existing equipment into the other rooms and adding the power and cooling capability for what is likely to be a 20MW system.

In May I was incredibly proud of our MSc students who won the ISC’23 Student Cluster Competition in Hamburg, Germany. With 22 teams from across the world this is a major accomplishment. Our team was the outright winner across the competition.

I hope the breadth of our activities comes across in this issue. Many of the projects we’re now involved in are benefitting from the past two years of development work on the Edinburgh International Data Facility. This complex infrastructure is now delivering a unique service for advanced data analytics and AI for our region.

As ever, please do let us know if you enjoy this issue and if there is anything you would like to hear about in more detail in a future issue.

Professor Mark Parsons
EPCC Director