3rd Annual HPC-AI Advisory Council and STFC DiRAC Conference, Oct. 13-14, to Explore the UK’s Science Superpower Agenda

SUNNYVALE, Calif. — The for community benefit HPC-AI Advisory Council, in collaboration with the UK’s Science & Technology Facilities Council (STFC) DiRAC Facility, has announced the 2021 UK Conference will take place, virtually, 13 and 14 October. Hosting from the BST time zone (UTC +1), the second all digital delivery presents a condensed agenda in two (3.5hr) sessions from […]

Quantum Computing: Inaugural €10,000 Hartree Centre & Atos Joseph Fourier Prize Launched

London, 16 September 2020 – Atos, a global leader in digital transformation, together with the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) Hartree Centre this week launch a new UK and Ireland competition aimed at supporting innovative work in the field of quantum computing. In encouraging researchers, academics and industrial scientists to submit their own research project it is hoped […]

Atos Supercomputer at Hartree Centre powers Coronavirus research

Today Atos announced that a BullSequana X1000 at the STFC Hartree Centre is providing supercomputing power to assist in global computational drug discovery efforts to help combat COVID-19. “By using some of the capability of the Hartree Centre’s Atos BullSequana X1000, the team are accelerating this process and creating new drug structures to be simulated fully across Folding@home’s distributed compute power.”

STFC Machine Learning Group Deploys Elastic NVMe Storage to Power GPU Servers

At SC19, Excelero announced that the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) has deployed a new HPC architecture to support computationally intensive analysis including machine learning and AI-based workloads using the NVMesh elastic NVMe block storage solution. “Done in partnership with Boston Limited, the deployment is enabling researchers from STFC and the Alan Turing Institute to complete machine learning training tasks that formerly took three to four days, in just one hour – and other foundational scientific computations that researchers formerly could not perform.”

40 Powers of 10 – Simulating the Universe with the DiRAC HPC Facility

Mark Wilkinson from DiRAC gave this talk at the Swiss HPC Conference. “DiRAC is the integrated supercomputing facility for theoretical modeling and HPC-based research in particle physics, and astrophysics, cosmology, and nuclear physics, all areas in which the UK is world-leading. DiRAC provides a variety of compute resources, matching machine architecture to the algorithm design and requirements of the research problems to be solved.”

Time-Lapse Video: Installation of Spectra Logic Tape Robot at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory

In this video, engineers install a Spectra Logic tape library at STFC’s Scientific Data Centre at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK. The new Spectra TFinity Tape Library has an initial capacity of 65PB. “This system will provide for the predicted data-growth from existing groups over the next decade, and an active archive for JASMIN users and the IRIS science communities. It brings SCD’s total tape storage capacity within the RAL Scientific Data Centre to 240PB.”

Panasas Upgrades JASMIN Super-Data-Cluster Facility to 20PB

Today Panasas announced that the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s (SFTC) Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) in the UK has expanded its JASMIN super-data-cluster with an additional 1.6 petabytes of Panasas ActiveStor storage, bringing total storage capacity to 20PB. This expansion required the formation of the largest realm of Panasas storage worldwide, which is managed by a single systems administrator. Thousands of users worldwide find, manipulate and analyze data held on JASMIN, which processes an average of 1-3PB of data every day.

Upcycled COSMA6 Supercomputer Finds New Life at Durham University

Where do old supercomputers go after the new machines are installed? At Durham University in the UK, they move on to a whole new mission in computational discovery. “COSMA6 enables researchers to extend large-scale structure simulations of the evolution of the universe, analyze data from gravitational wave detectors, and simulate the Sun and planets in the solar system. COSMA6 is live and operational from April 2017.”

Atos Delivers Bull sequana Supercomputer to Hartree Centre

Today Atos announced the first installation of its Bull sequana X1000 new-generation supercomputer system in the UK at the Hartree Centre. Founded by the UK government, the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) Hartree Centre is a high performance computing and data analytics research facility. Described as “the world’s most efficient supercomputer,” Bull sequana is an exascale-class computer capable of processing a billion billion operations per second while consuming 10 times less energy than current systems.

PSyclone Software Eases Weather and Climate Forecasting

“PSyclone was developed for the UK Met Office and is now a part of the build system for Dynamo, the dynamical core currently in development for the Met Office’s ‘next generation’ weather and climate model software. By generating the complex code needed to make use of thousands of processors, PSyclone leaves the Met Office scientists free to concentrate on the science aspects of the model. This means that they will not have to change their code from something that works on a single processing unit (or core) to something that runs on many thousands of cores.”