Bioinformatics and more widely Computational Biology is a largely data-driven Science. The array of high-throughput technology platforms in the last 10 years mean that the amount of data being generated in this field is likely to enter into Exabytes by 2020. The challenges associated with this are quite different from the data sets generated by Hig…

Performing complex solar shading analysis to take into account the sun's path and solar penetration on large buildings has historically consumed very many CPU cycles for IES "Virtual Environment" (3D building physics) simulation users. One particularly complex model took almost 2 weeks to process.A description of the collaboration between IES and E…

Intel will provide an insight into future HPC technology development looking at hardware trends, ecosystem support and the challenges around ExaScale computing.The talk will also touch upon the convergence of High Performance Computing and High Performance Data Analytics, examining where the effective use of this rapidly maturing capability can pro…

PrimeGrid is a volunteer computing project that gives participants the chance to be the discoverer of a new world record prime number! In addition, we are working towards the solution of several mathematical problems which have remained unsolved for over 50 years. The talk will cover some basic facts about prime numbers, the history of the search f…

There are several important science and engineering problems that require the coordinated execution of multiple high-performance simulations. Some common scenarios include but are not limited to, "an ensemble of tasks", "loosely-coupled simulations of tightly-coupled simulations" or "multi-component multi-physics simulations". However, historically…

In this talk I will give a brief history of parallel processing in games and how the industry has responded to hardware changes in its constant race to create games with more, better and faster. I then consider some of the lessons we have learned so far and finish with my opinion on how a future game engine might be structured to target many-core a…

The Met Office hosts some the largest computers in the UK to predict the weather and changes in the climate. Best known for the Public Weather Service, the Met Office also advises UK government and other organisations world wide. The difficulties of modelling such a complex system as the Earth's atmosphere, how it is actually done and what future c…

This talk will look at the drivers leading the way to Exascale computing. It will examine technology trends, and use these to infer some of the characteristics of future large scale HPC systems. It will also look in to what this means for the software environment, reliability, use and affordability of IT systems at the high end. Recently, the IT in…

Building design has been revolutionised in recent years. New materials and better construction techniques have allowed bespoke andimpressive public spaces to be created. Consider the Millennium Dome, Hong Kong airport, or the 2012 Olympic stadium. These bespoke spaces represent a significant challenge for fire safety. Unlike for conventional buildi…

The past five years have seen the use of graphical processing units for computation grow from being the interest of handful of early adopters to a mainstream technology used in the world’s largest supercomputers. The CUDA GPU programming ecosystem today provides all that a developer needs to accelerate scientific applications with GPUs. The archi…

We will review some basic properties and theorems regarding prime numbers, and take a quick trip through the history of prime number searching. Secondly, we will discuss two classes of algorithms of importance for computational primality testing - Sieving and the Lucas-Lehmer (and similar) tests - and their implementations on modern CPUs and GPUs. …

There is a plethora of version control systems and it is not obvious which to choose. Doyou pine for the warm, comforting blanket of CVS? Fear not! I shall give an overview of the zoo of version control systems available to the modern programmer. I'll describe the design principles (there is much overlap) and how these influence the use patterns. I…

Cloud computing has become one of the most advertised and talked about technologies for the past few years since many ISPs/IT firms have begun to adopt virtualisation technologies. As cloud technologies mature, more and more businesses are moving their services into “the cloudâ€� or building internal clouds to cater for their IT needs. Gihan Muna…

Fluidity is a powerful Computational Fluid Dynamics framework developed at Imperial College over the last 20 years. Fluidity can be applied to a number of scientific applications, ranging from classic CFD, to oceans and multi-material problems. It uses a variety of discretisations on an unstructured mesh and includes a number of novel and innovativ…

The Materials Chemistry Consortium (MCC) is the single largest consumer of resources on the HECToR National Supercomputer. In this talk I will give an overview of how MCC members exploit HECToR in a wide range of materials chemistry research and the types of applications that we are interested in. Links: Slides - Talk slides…

Traditional disk technology has lagged behind processor and memory technology for some time. During this session we will discuss what the problems are and how new technologies such as enterprise class Solid State Drives (SSD) are helping. Until now, high performance storage systems have been designed around the characteristics of spinning magnetic …

The Met Office has long used high performance computing to support its activities in weather prediction and climate research. This talk starts by giving an overview of the numerical weather prediction process and continues with a look at the HPC platforms used to make solving these problems possible. Some of the challenges currently faced, particul…

This talk traces the development of the different types of instruction-level parallelism that have been incorporated into the hardware of processors from the early 1960s to the present day. We will see how the use of parallel function units in the CDC 6600 eventually led to the design of the Cray-1 with its vector processing instructions and supers…

Lattice QCD is a very important tool for understanding the Standard Model of particle physics. It presents enormous computational challenges, both in carrying out simulations and in making sure they are as efficient as possible. This lecture explains why we need lattice QCD; describes how the UKQCD Collaboration sets out to overcome these computati…