EPSRC Recognizes Young Scientists using ARCHER Supercomputing Facility

Today EPSRC in the UK announced the 10 winners of the recent ARCHER Best-Use Travel Competition. The competition aimed to identify the best scientific use of ARCHER, the UK’s national supercomputing facility, within the arena of the engineering and physical sciences. “As we see the increasing need for high performance computing to tackle today’s complex scientific questions, we recognize the need to encourage today’s young researchers to bring their skills to the world,” said Dr. Eddie Clarke, EPSRC’s Contract Manager for ARCHER. “The winners of these awards have shown ability, enthusiasm and real skill in their research and these prizes will help them work together with partners overseas to benefit science in the UK.”

Test Your Knowledge with the MPI Quiz

In this video, David Henty from EPCC conducts a video-based quiz on MPI. “The multiple-choice questions are partly designed for fun to test attendees’ knowledge, but are mainly aimed at promoting discussion about MPI and its usage in real applications. All that is assumed is a working knowledge of basic MPI functionality: send, receive, collectives, derived datatypes and non-blocking communications.”

Will Deep Learning Scale to Supercomputers?

Are supercomputers practical for Deep Learning applications? Over at the Allinea Blog, Mark O’Connor writes that a recent experiment with machine learning optimization on the Archer supercomputer shows that relatively simple models run at sufficiently large scale can readily outperform more complex but less scalable models. “In the open science world, anyone running a HPC cluster can expect to see a surge in the number of people wanting to run deep learning workloads over the coming months.”

SGI Powers New Cirrus Supercomputer at EPCC

Businesses could dramatically cut the time taken to bring new products and services to market with help from a new SGI supercomputer at EPCC, the UK’s leading supercomputing center based at the University of Edinburgh. “This newly installed computing power – in tandem with EPCC’s in-house expertise – means we are well placed to help businesses meet many of the computational challenges associated with developing new products and services,” said George Graham, Commercial Manager of EPCC.

Cray to Add Intel Xeon Phi to Archer Supercomputing Service in the UK

EPSRC and Cray have signed an agreement to add a Cray XC40 Development System with Intel Xeon Phi processors to ARCHER, the UK National Supercomputing Service. “The new Development system will have a very similar environment to the main ARCHER system, including Cray’s Aries interconnect, operating system and Cray tools, meaning that interested users will enjoy a straightforward transition.”

Alan Turing Institute Hits the Ground Running for HPC & Data Science

The Alan Turing Institute is the UK’s national institute for data science. It has marked its first few days of operations with the announcement of its new director, the confirmation of £10 million of research funding from Lloyd’s Register Foundation, a research partnership with GCHQ, collaboration with the EPSRC and Cray, and the commencement of its first research activities.