Advanced Computing: HPC and RDS at University of Bristol

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In this video from the HPC User Forum in Tucson, Simon Burbidge from the University of Bristol presents: Advanced Computing: HPC and RDS.

“The High Performance Computing group, led by Simon McIntosh-Smith, is part of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Bristol. Our research focuses on the application of heterogeneous and many-core computing to solve large-scale scientific problems. Related research problems we are addressing include: performance portability across many-core devices; automatic optimization of many-core codes; communication-avoiding algorithms for massive scale systems; and fault tolerance software techniques for resiliency at scale.”

Bristol University also boasts the Advanced Computing Research Centre hosting the BlueCrystal supercomputers. BlueCrystal Phase 3 and Phase 4 both featured in the Top 500 supercomputers in the world in 2013 and 2016 respectively. The University’s HPC resources on Phase 4 include around 16,000 cores and 64 NVIDIA P100 GPUs resulting in a peak 600 teraflops of performance.

In 2017, the GW4 Alliance, along partners Cray Inc. and the Met Office were awarded £3m by EPSRC to deliver a new production Tier 2 HPC system for UK-based researchers. The Isambard system will explore multiple advanced computer architectures, including 64-bit ARM, and will focus on exploring the performance of the UK’s most used HPC codes. The University of Bristol became an Intel Parallel Computing Center (IPCC) in January 2014 (see the press announcement).

Simon Burbidge is Director of Advanced Computing, IT Services at the University of Bristol.

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