newsIssue 84 AUTUMN 2018

The newsletter of EPCC, the supercomputing centre at the University of Edinburgh

The Bayes Centre: EPCC’s new home at the heart of the Data Driven Innovation Programme and supercomputing in the UK

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EPCC’s new homeWe’ve moved!

Prosperity PartnershipNext-generation engineering simulation

Catalyst UK programmeMajor Arm-based HPC system

Industry roundupOur industry partnerships

Data-driven innovationWhat it means for business

Fortissimo reviewBringing HPC to business

VESTEC projectHPC for urgent decision making

ISO certification Ensuring data security

Data researchSupporting national policy making

Humanities dataCray Urika-GX’s data services

Our MSc programmesNew beginnings

Online learning at EPCCStudy with us anywhere

SpiNNakerNeuromorphic HPC at EPCC

EPCC’s Computing FacilityEnergy-efficient computing

EPiGRAM-HS projectDoing more with less

ARCHER eCSEFunding research software

Cell biology image analysisImproving usability

Women in HPCWe are now a local ChapterHPC-Europa3 User group meeting review

Research software engineersBuilding a new community

OutreachEPCC at New Scientist Live

EPCC will be participating in a wide range of activities at this year’s Supercomputing conference in Dallas, including the "Open Source Supercomputing" workshop, the "Sustaining Research Software" panel, and BoF sessions on “Software Engineering and Reuse in Computational Science and Engineering", "Multi-Level Memory and Storage for HPC and Data Analytics", and education, outreach and training discussions.

There will be presentations about different projects EPCC is involved in, including VESTEC (see p9) and INTERTWinE at the PRACE booth

(2033). At the EPCC booth in the exhibition hall you can find out about our latest work including our involvement in the Data Driven Innovation Programme. Partner booths include the European Exascale Project booth (237), where you can learn about DEEP-EST and SAGE2, and booth 1847 where the GEANT networking project is represented.

Adrian Jackson, EPCCa.jackson@epcc.ed.ac.uk

Welcome to the Autumn 2018 edition of EPCC News. Over the summer EPCC has moved offices for the first time in its 28-year history.

While the process has not been without its challenges, we’ve now settled into our beautiful new home on the second floor of the £45m Bayes Centre in central Edinburgh. We’re already benefiting from this central location in terms of interaction with the School of Informatics and visitors to the University.

The Bayes Centre is one of the six new buildings funded through the Edinburgh & SE Scotland City Region deal which was signed by the Prime Minister and First Minister in August. As well as being a key organisation within the Bayes Centre, EPCC is also in charge of creating the World Class Data Infrastructure which supports the Data Driven Innovation Programme. Over the next 10 years we will invest £115 million in this infrastructure including an increase to 32MW of

power at the ACF and a fourth computer room.

We have also successfully won a number of new projects which you can read about in this issue. The largest of these is the 5-year £15m Prosperity Partnership which EPCC leads with Rolls-Royce. This project will develop the world’s first high-fidelity simulation of a next-generation gas turbine engine in operation.

We are also looking forward to the delivery of our first large-scale Arm-based HPC system from the Catalyst UK project led by HPE. This 4,096-core system based on Cavium’s ThunderX2 Arm processor is a new departure for us. More diversity in processor technology is very important for the long-term future of the HPC industry world-wide - particularly as we approach the Exascale.

I hope you enjoy this issue!

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Contents

www.epcc.ed.ac.uk info@epcc.ed.ac.uk +44 (0)131 650 5030 Twitter: @EPCCed

EPCC is a supercomputing centre based at The University of Edinburgh, which is a charitable body registered in Scotland with registration number SC005336.

From our Director

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EPCC at Supercomputing 2018

Full details of all our activities at SC’18 can be found on our website: http://bit.ly/2CPaihv

Mark Parsons, EPCC Director m.parsons@epcc.ed.ac.uk

EPCC booth: 2800

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3The newsletter of EPCC, the supercomputing centre at the University of Edinburgh

In August EPCC moved to the Bayes Centre, the University of Edinburgh’s new community of academic, research and commercial expertise located on its Central campus.

EPCC has left its original home on the Kings Buildings Campus to join the newly established Bayes Centre community, which will eventually house some 600 experts in data science and artificial intelligence from research and industry.

The move brings us into much closer contact with other data-based organisations such as The Data Lab, the Centre for Design Informatics, and the Alan Turing Institute. Our new open-plan study area also allows our MSc and PhD students to better integrate with EPCC’s staff (see p10).

The Bayes Centre is one of the University’s five innovation hubs, which are each designed to fuel growth in industry partnerships. World-leading technology, data science and enterprise teams will work together with corporate partners at the Centre to help shape the future using data-driven

innovation. Education offerings for companies are also being developed here.

The Bayes will enable the University to build on its globally recognised strengths in data management, artificial intelligence, theoretical computer science, computational linguistics, systems architectures and bioinformatics.

As part of the University’s strategy to build multi-disciplinary partnerships with industry, the Bayes Centre will accommodate industrial tenants such as satellite-technology provider Orbital Micro Systems (OMS), (see page 6 for our collaboration with this company), and we look forward to the further opportunities for knowledge exchange the Bayes will bring.

Finally, we are very much enjoying exploring the exciting lunch opportunities in our new neighbourhood!

“EPCC’s move to the Bayes Centre is a really important moment in its history. We’re at the heart of the Data Driven Innovation Programme and supercomputing in the UK, and this new home brings us closer to many new opportunities for collaboration in the region.” Mark Parsons, EPCC Director

Images of the Bayes Centre by Mark K Jackson and Mark Reynolds.

The Bayes Centre: EPCC’s new home

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The five-year “Strategic Partnership in Computational Science for Advanced Simulation and Modelling of Virtual Systems” (ASiMoV for short) is embarking on an extremely challenging programme of research to enable this level of simulation. It will require breakthroughs at all levels (mathematics, algorithms, software, and security) and uniquely combines fundamental engineering and computational science research to address a challenge that is well beyond the capabilities of today’s state of the art.

The ultimate long-term goal of the research is to enable the “virtual certification” of aero engines, be they gas-turbine, hybrid or fully electric, by 2030. The journey to virtual certification requires a thorough evidential database to convince the certification authorities that the analysis can be trusted. For example, engine manufacturers working with the FAA have successfully replaced the large bird-strike certification test with analysis - it took around ten years to obtain FAA approval for virtual certification. Virtual certification is

not a single well-defined milestone to be reached by 2030 however. The necessary simulation capability is essential, but so is the evidential basis for trusting the simulation.

Requirements for speed, fidelity and accuracy are well beyond current simulation and high performance computing capability. Where simulations can be carried out at all, they do not meet fidelity requirements and take weeks or even months to complete. True virtual certification simulations will therefore require new high-resolution physical models and full system simulations that drive us from today’s model sizes (with 10-100 million cells) towards models with trillions of cells. A result will be the need for techniques that can exploit future computing platforms and the unprecedented amounts of data they consume and produce, robustly, securely and affordably.

This is a transformational change requiring a transformational collaboration, and EPCC is delighted to be leading the Partnership.

New Prosperity Partnership to develop world first in high-fidelity engineering simulations

Rolls-Royce power gearbox. Image: Rolls-Royce plc

In addition to Edinburgh, the Prosperity Partnership includes four Universities (Bristol, Cambridge, Oxford and Warwick) as well as two SMEs, CFMS and Zenotech.

Michèle Weiland, EPCCm.weiland@epcc.ed.ac.uk

A consortium led by Rolls-Royce and EPCC was recently awarded a Prosperity Partnership worth £14.7m to develop the next generation of engineering simulation and modelling techniques, with the aim of developing the world’s first high-fidelity simulation of a complete gas-turbine engine during operation.

The partners gathered for the Partnership’s kick-off meeting.

5The newsletter of EPCC, the supercomputing centre at the University of Edinburgh

The HPE Apollo 70-based systems will each consist of 64 compute nodes with two 32-core Cavium ThunderX2 processors (ie 4096 cores in total), 128GB of memory composed of 16 DDR4 DIMMs, and Mellanox InfiniBand interconnects. They will be made available to both industry and academia, with the aim to build applications that drive economic growth and productivity as outlined in the UK government’s Industrial Strategy.

As part of the programme, EPCC will port the most heavily used ARCHER and Cirrus packages to the Catalyst system and make them available as modules, so that it’s easy for users to explore the new platform.

Our initial focus will be on making as many applications available as possible. As documentation is a key component of driving adoption, we will create detailed build process documentation as part of our porting activities and contribute to the Arm HPC community on GitLab.

It is expected that the initial porting

exercise will unearth issues (eg with compilers, libraries, or the network) and we will work closely with the vendors to resolve these. A handful of applications will be selected for in-depth optimisation - areas of particular interest are engineering, computational chemistry, and weather and ocean modelling, and these will be given priority. However it’s not an exclusive club: industry, high-performance data analytics and machine learning applications are also welcome.

Catalyst training

From 3–4 December, we will run a PRACE Advanced Training Centre course (free to attend for all) that will teach participants about the Catalyst system architecture and software stack, how to compile codes for Arm, as well as performance hints and tips.

The installation of our Catalyst system at EPCC’s Advanced Computing Facility is imminent, and we are eagerly looking forward to exploring the potential of this Arm-based HPC system!

Catalyst UK programme brings Arm-based

HPC system to EPCC!

Michèle Weiland, EPCCm.weiland@epcc.ed.ac.uk

Earlier this year, HPE announced the Catalyst UK programme: a collaboration with Arm, SUSE and three UK universities to deploy one of the largest Arm-based high performance computing (HPC) installations in the world. EPCC was chosen as the site for one of these systems; the other two are the Universities of Bristol and Leicester.

Areas of particular interest to the initial phase of the Catalyst programme include weather and ocean modelling.

© iStock.com/shayes17

Hewlett Packard Enterprise www.hpe.com

SUSE www.suse.com

UK Industrial Strategy www.gov.uk/government/topical-events/the-uks-industrial-strategy

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Industry projects round up

2018 continues to be a busy year for EPCC in terms of industrial collaborations. Following our move to the new Bayes Centre, we look forward to further exciting industrial collaborations.

HPC access programmes

EPCC’s ‘Accelerator’ and on-demand access programmes for industrial users of our world-class HPC infrastructure continue to thrive. We have ongoing collaborations with major players such as Shearwater (advanced ocean modelling) and Screen LASSE (simulation support for advanced semiconductor device manufacture). A collaboration with ENGYS has created a cost effective, pay-per-use, simulation-as-a-service business model offering access to advanced CFD modelling based on an implementation of ENGYS’ HELYX product.

Thomas Blyth, EPCC, t.blyth@epcc.ed.ac.uk

Paywizard

We recently completed a successful project with Paywizard, the pay-TV subscription, billing, and customer relationship management specialist, to drive the development of new AI-driven capabilities within its subscriber intelligence platform. Our data science specialists enhanced existing machine learning capabilities within the Paywizard platform and developed further predictive modelling capabilities.

A resultant AI product, Paywizard Singula, went on to win a ‘Best of Show’ TV technology award at IBC, the industry’s largest European event.

Orbital Micro Systems

EPCC is working closely with satellite technology provider Orbital Micro Systems (OMS) as part of the newly formed International Centre for Earth Data (ICED) where a satellite-based system is being developed that will vastly improve monitoring and forecasting of extreme weather and natural disasters anywhere in the world.

The programme will capture and analyse data from OMS’ planned constellation of 40 satellites – each about the size of a large shoebox. These missions will include the first launch of the recently announced UK spaceflight programme, using the planned spaceport on Scotland’s north coast.

The ICED will enable near real-time monitoring and improved forecasts for sectors such as insurance, agriculture, aviation, and shipping. EPCC is providing data analytics expertise in conjunction with the latest in high performance computing (HPC) research to manage such large data sets. HPC is crucial when dealing with the petabyte levels of data required for this type of satellite-based modelling.

This multi-disciplinary project involving EPCC and the University’s Schools of Geosciences and Informatics is a great example of the projects that will be at the forefront of the Bayes Centre agenda.

Sustainably

We have also just kicked off a project with the fast-growing fintech start-up, Sustainably. EPCC is providing software and data architecture expertise to support the company’s rapid growth plans as it looks to scale its offering across the open banking network.

DJ Alexander

In a similar vein, EPCC is supporting the Edinburgh-based property management company DJ Alexander, which will launch an innovative online platform in 2019. We are providing software engineering expertise to its growing development team.

Contact our business team to find out more.George Graham: g.graham@epcc.ed.ac.uk

Thomas Blyth: t.blyth@epcc.ed.ac.uk

EPCC is working with satellite technology provider Orbital Micro Systems in the International Centre for Earth Data which will improve forecasts for sectors including shipping.

© iStock.com/wissanu01

7The newsletter of EPCC, the supercomputing centre at the University of Edinburgh

Thomas Blyth and Mark Sawyer, EPCCt.blyth@epcc.ed.ac.ukm.sawyer@epcc.ed.ac.uk

The expertise and support available in Scotland has created a massive opportunity for our engineering and manufacturing sectors and, with the launch of the £500m Data-Driven Innovation (DDI) strand of the Edinburgh and South-East Scotland City Region Deal, this is an exciting time for exploring how technology can benefit business.

Industry can gain huge benefits by combining data science expertise, HPC hardware, and readily-available software and data analytics tools. HPC enables data scientists to manage, process and work with extremely large and complex datasets, which in turn allows businesses to develop new products and revenue streams.

The Bayes Centre in Edinburgh is home to a community of world-leading data science and artificial intelligence teams, including EPCC, and it is set to play a key role in delivering the DDI programme. Central to the programme is a new facility for the secure hosting and analysis of huge and varied datasets. This £70m investment in the World-Class Data Infrastructure (WCDI) will be fundamental in positioning the City Region as data capital of Europe, acting as an enabler for many data science

projects for industry, academia or both, and – by bringing together regional, national and international datasets – facilitating new products, services, and research.

The WCDI’s high-resiliency data and computing facilities will support work with complex, high volume, real-time datasets from across the City Region and beyond. We are already seeing demand from a wide range of sectors including fintech and other financial services, space and satellite, data analytics, and tech start-ups. The establishment of this data hub and the production of new applications will in turn lead to new companies.

EPCC collaborates with companies of all sizes to tackle real-life problems or enhance business processes, and the direct results can include gaining a competitive advantage, reducing costs, or improving operational or research and development processes. Here at EPCC we see the WCDI as a unique opportunity for companies to adopt data-driven innovation. It will offer state-of-the-art data and compute infrastructure, supported by data analytics and modelling skills from across the University of Edinburgh and the wider region.

Contact our business team to find out more.George Graham: g.graham@epcc.ed.ac.uk

Thomas Blyth: t.blyth@epcc.ed.ac.uk

There is a lot of hype around big data and big computing for business, but it is undeniable that the influence of data-driven innovation will be profound.

To understand the potential impact of data-driven innovation, consider the case of a manufacturing production line, running 24 hours a day: an unexpected breakdown will be extremely costly.

A modern production line generates a huge amount of data from fault-detecting sensors. If machine learning could predict faults before they occur, the number of times the line breaks down would be dramatically reduced, leading to massive savings. This kind of application, where computers make predictions based on meaningful patterns in data sets, will increase in importance as the amount of data grows.

© iStock.com/enot-polosku

Data-driven innovation for business

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The overall purpose of Fortissimo was to demonstrate that the benefits which the cloud has brought to enterprise computing can be replicated in engineering fields such as modelling and simulation, and also in high-performance data-analytics. Cloud computing reduces an enterprise’s cost and complexity by removing the need for it to buy and operate its own computing equipment. Instead it can access services provided by third parties, allowing it to focus on its core expertise.

Fortissimo has shown that similar benefits can be obtained by offering high performance computing (HPC) in this way. Most small companies cannot afford the high entry cost of acquiring and operating an HPC system, even though it is a proven technology. By providing access to HPC systems as a service, Fortissimo has allowed companies to trial engineering techniques that were previously out of reach.

Access to resources is, however, only part of the solution. Another vital component is expertise,

whether this is related directly to HPC or associated with the specific business in question. The Fortissimo approach was to bring together the necessary expertise in small partnerships that could then focus on a specific business problem. There was a stringent selection process for these experiments, with a series of competitive calls for proposals. We learned that there is great demand to trial HPC in this way, with the calls being oversubscribed almost ten-fold.

Fortissimo Marketplace

The Fortissimo project led directly to the creation of the Fortissimo Marketplace, which offers services developed in the experiments and by HPC centres and other providers. This Marketplace will enable companies to access advanced modelling, simulation and data-analytics services using a pay-per-use model, with the ultimate aim of improving the competitiveness of the European economy.

Mark Sawyerm.sawyer@epcc.ed.ac.uk

December 2018 marks the end of the Fortissimo project. EPCC has been collaborating in the programme since 2013, and during this time 92 business experiments have been carried out with over 100 small European companies, many of which had no previous experience of using HPC.

Fortissimo Marketplace

www.fortissimo-project.eu/

The Fortissimo experiments came from a diverse range of industry sectors. You can read about each experiment on the Fortissimo website: www.fortissimo-project.eu/success-stories.

Swedish SME Koenigsegg develops and produces high-performance, limited-edition motor vehicles. Its use of HPC-based simulation for the production of a new car configuration led to a 30% saving in design costs, a reduction of 50% in wind tunnel and physical testing, a 60% saving in prototyping costs, and a 30% shortening of time to market.

Fortissimo: a boost for European business

9The newsletter of EPCC, the supercomputing centre at the University of Edinburgh

It is not just HPC that has benefited from phenomenal developments in hardware: our ability to physically collect data, for example via high-velocity sensors, has also undergone a revolution in recent years.

Until now, the role that HPC can play in complementing this and turning data streaming into valuable collateral has been overlooked. But this is not a simple job and entails much more than hooking up some data sources to HPC machines. Instead, to fuse HPC with real-time data, a large number of challenges need to be tackled, from the low level software stack up to interactive visualisation tools.

The VESTEC project will tackle these challenges to make HPC more interactive and capable of processing raw data arriving in real time, so creating a tool for use in urgent decision-making. It is our hypothesis that combining HPC computational models with real-time data will significantly aid in urgent decision-making, ultimately saving lives and reducing economic loss.

VESTEC is focusing on three use cases: forest fires, the impact of space weather (specifically the

disruption cause by geomagnetic storms), and mosquito-borne diseases. Not only do these areas entail risk to life, they also have a significant economic impact (estimated at billions of dollars a year). We hope that by combining traditional simulations with high-velocity sensor data, it will be possible to make correlations between simulations and observations such that much more precise and reliable predictions can be generated. These would feed into disaster recovery or even prevention.

At EPCC we are leading the work-package on interactive supercomputing. This is especially interesting for us as it combines our expertise in traditional HPC with that of data, to challenge some of the assumptions that the current generation of HPC machines are built upon. I think it is going to be fascinating to see how, over the next three years of the project, the technology and techniques that we will develop as part of VESTEC contribute to solving the challenges we have identified and their resulting wider societal impact. VESTEC is funded by the EU’s Horizon2020 programme. It started in September 2018 and will run for three years. The project has eleven partners, each with a different area of expertise.

Meet us at SC’18Our BoF at SC18, “HPC meets Real-Time Data: Interactive Supercomputing for Urgent Decision Making” will run between 12:15 and 13:15 on Thursday 15th November. If you are going to SC, it would be great to see you there!

VESTEC: saving the world one byte at a time

With jobs submitted to a batch system, supercomputing has traditionally been centred around an offline, non-interactive approach to running codes such as simulations. However, it is our belief that there is great potential in fusing HPC with real-time data for use as part of urgent decision-making processes in response to natural disasters and crises.

Nick Brown, EPCCn.brown@epcc.ed.ac.uk

Image shows Wildfire Analyst, one of the VESTEC partners and three project use-cases. It models the spread of forest fires, and is used to assist in disaster planning and mitigation. The VESTEC project will develop infrastructure which enables this application to be fed with real time sensor data and run ensemble fashion on supercomputers. The end result will be a step change in capability for disaster recovery teams, where they can much more accurately advise fire fighting teams on the ground to contain the fire and ultimately save lives.

© iStock.com/JPhilipson

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Here at EPCC we aim to be a leader in the secure hosting and management of huge and varied datasets to support data research. For example we host and manage Safe Havens on behalf of the Farr Institute and Scottish Genome Partnership, with a Safe Haven for the Alan Turing Institute under development. 

A Safe Haven is a secure environment in which data is linked and accessed. It provides a high powered computing service, secure analytic environment, secure file transfer protocol for receipt of data, and provision of a range of analytic software. Safe havens allow data from electronic records to be used to support research when it is not practicable to obtain individual patient or subject consent, and protect patient or subject identity and privacy. Data from different sources can be linked to answer specific research questions, subject to the required information governance.

The University of Edinburgh is set to play a key role in the Edinburgh and South East Scotland City Region Deal, delivering the deal’s Data-Driven Innovation programme. Underpinning new data innovation hubs across the University will be an exciting new facility for the secure and trustworthy hosting and analysis of huge and varied

datasets hosted and managed by EPCC. Key to the success of EPCC in providing data services is trust from its customers that it provides best practice in information security and data handling. ISO 27001 certification introduces a framework to deliver best practice and to demonstrate this achievement to our customer and user base. 

ISO 27001 is a specification for an information security management system (ISMS). An ISMS is a framework of policies and procedures that includes all legal, physical and technical controls involved in an organisation’s information risk management processes.

EPCC has designed an ISMS to provide services and systems to meet the terms of the relevant contracts and agreements with respect to confidentiality, integrity, accessibility and availability. It has also been designed to meet the information security risk appetite of its stakeholders. With ISO 27001 and ISO 9001 Quality Management certifications, we are confident that we have the processes and information security framework which deliver best practice services to our customers and provide a mechanism to continually improve our services to meet customer and user requirements.

SAFER, SMARTER, GREENER

BUSINESS ASSURANCE

Guidelines with yearSeptember 2016

MANAGEMENT SYSTEM CERTIFICATION

A value to communicate

Your data is secure with

EPCC!

EPCC has recently been certified for the ISO 27001 Information Security standard for all the HPC and Data Services that we run, including ARCHER, Cirrus, the RDF, Farr National Safe Haven and Tesseract.

The UK Research Data Facility, hosted by EPCC. Image: Craig Manzi.

About ISO 27001 ISO 27001 requires management to:

Systematically examine the organisation’s information security risks, taking account of the threats, vulnerabilities, and impacts;

Design and implement a coherent and comprehensive suite of information security controls and/or other forms of risk treatment (such as risk avoidance or risk transfer) to address those risks that are deemed unacceptable; and

Adopt an overarching management process to ensure that the information security controls continue to meet the organisation’s information security needs on an ongoing basis.

Anne Whiting, EPCCa.whiting@epcc.ed.ac.uk

11The newsletter of EPCC, the supercomputing centre at the University of Edinburgh

The aim of the partnership is to enable research that leads to policy decisions that will in turn will help Scotland progress towards the vision outlined in the National Performance Framework. This framework helps to shape high level research priorities for Scottish Government, including tackling poverty, providing quality jobs and fair work for all, and ensuring that we live in inclusive, empowered, resilient and safe communities. S-ADRP consists of a number of Strategic Impact Programmes (SIPs) each dealing with a research priority.

Underpinning all this is data. EPCC’s role in the partnership will be to help provide research-ready data from the numerous sources that will be needed to support policy-making decisions. These sources include health and educational records, police and judicial databases, census data and emergency services data. Of course, there are governance issues related to the use of this data, as it comes from many sources and contains sensitive information. The framework that will allow researchers to use this data must

ensure that legal and ethical practices (such as the removal of data that enables identification of an individual) are followed.

The technical infrastructure that will support this is a Safe Haven operated by EPCC, which protects patient identity and privacy while allowing data from electronic records to be used to support research when it is not practicable to obtain individual patient consent.

The partners are currently investigating ways to link the data derived from various databases so that it can be used by researchers working in the SIPs. This linked data must provide the information needed by the researchers to derive useful findings, but must also preserve the privacy of individuals according to the governance policies.

In addition to this is the task of making the data ready for research. This includes ‘cleaning’ the data (for example identifying and dealing with records containing data that is clearly out of range) and, since the databases will be large, optimising them to support the types of query that the researchers will generate.

Scottish Administrative Data Research Partnership https://adrn.ac.uk/about/network/scotland/

Mark Sawyer, EPCCm.sawyer@epcc.ed.ac.uk

EPCC has received funding via the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) to continue its work with the Scottish Administrative Data Research Partnership (S-ADRP).

Scottish Administrative Data Research Partnership

© iStock.com/Rawpixel

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Our collaboration aimed to run text analysis codes developed by UCL upon data used by CAAHSS to exercise the data access, transfer and analysis services of the Turing Institute’s deployment of a Cray Urika-GX system.

We used two data sets of interest to CAHSS and hosted within the University of Edinburgh’s DataStore: British Library newspapers data (around 1tb of digitised newspapers from the 18th–20th centuries), and British Library books data (around 224gb of compressed digitised books from the 16th–19th centuries). Both are collections of XML documents, but have been organised differently and conform to different XML schemas, so affecting how the data can be queried.

To access both data sets from within Urika, we mounted the DataStore directories into our home directories on Urika using SSHFS. We then copied the data into Urika’s own Lustre file system. We did this because, unlike Urika’s login nodes, Urika’s compute nodes have no network access and so cannot

access the DataStore via the mount points. Also, by moving the data to Lustre, we minimised the need for data movement and network transfer during analysis.

To exercise Urika’s data analytics capabilities, we ran two text analysis codes, one for each collection, which were initially developed by UCL with the British Library.

UCL’s code for analysing the newspapers data is written in Python and runs queries via the Apache Spark framework. A range of queries are supported eg count the number of articles per year, count the frequencies of a given list of words, find expressions matching a pattern.

UCL’s code for analysing the books data is also written in Python and runs queries via mpi4py, a wrapper for the message-passing interface (MPI) for parallel programming. However, work had been started on migrating some of these queries to use Spark. A range of queries are supported eg count the total number of pages across all books,

In our role as members of the Research Engineering Group of the Alan Turing Institute, we have been working with Melissa Terras, University of Edinburgh’s College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CAHSS), and Raquel Alegre, Research IT Services, University College London (UCL), to explore text analysis of humanities data.

Analysing humanities data using Cray Urika-GX

The Cray Urika GX system is a high-performance analytics cluster with a pre-integrated stack of popular analytics packages, including Apache Spark, Apache Hadoop, Jupyter notebooks and complemented by frameworks to develop data analytics applications in Python, Scala, R and Java.

Plot of proportion of books mentioning ‘cholera’ against publication date.

13The newsletter of EPCC, the supercomputing centre at the University of Edinburgh

count the frequencies of a given list of words, etc. This code is complemented with a set of Jupyter notebooks to visualise query results and to perform further analyses.

To run the codes within Urika we needed to modify them both to run without any dependence on UCL’s local environment, and instead access data located within Lustre. As a result, the modified newspapers code now allows the location of XML documents to be specified using either URLs or absolute file paths. The modified books code now runs its MPI-based queries via Urika’s Apache Mesos resource manager.

For the books data, Melissa suggested that we try to reproduce the results from her Jisc Research Data Spring 2015 project at UCL. This project developed queries to search for the names of thirteen diseases (eg “cholera”, “tuberculosis” etc) and return the total number of occurrences of each name, and to then to normalise the results by the number of books, pages and words per year to see

how these occurrences change over time. Taken together, one can examine the extent to which references to specific diseases change in literature over time.

We compared the results of running the modified code on Urika to the original results and they were generally consistent but with some anomalies which we identified as arising from data missing from the books data set held within DataStore, which has been reported back to Melissa.

Urika is designed with the use of Spark in mind and Spark is well-suited for this form of text analysis. Migrating the mpi4py books queries to Spark would be a good area for future work, combining this with the newspapers code which already uses Spark and can handle several XML Schemas. This would then yield a single code, with a common underlying data model, that could run queries across both the newspapers and books data.

This work was funded by Scottish Enterprise as part of the Alan Turing Institute-Scottish Enterprise Data Engineering Programme.

Rosa Filgueira and Mike Jackson, EPCCr. filgueira@epcc.ed.ac.ukm.jackson@epcc.ed.ac.uk

Our updated codes and documentation on how to run them are publicly available on GitHub.

• Newspaper code: http://bit.ly/2EQrYvS

• Books code (Spark version): http://bit.ly/2qeCwL7

• Books code (MPI version): http://bit.ly/2ES63EJ

• Jupyter notebook for books: http://bit.ly/2JmcIoZ

Research Engineering Group of the Alan Turing Institute www.turing.ac.uk/research/research-engineering

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New beginnings

Every new academic year is filled with new beginnings, and 2018/19 is certainly not short of them with:

• 36 students commencing their studies on the MSc programmes

• EPCC’s first year in its new home in the Bayes Centre in the University’s Central Area

• Increased cooperation with the School of Informatics

• Four new courses in the MSc programmes and four new Personal Tutors

• A scholarship and industrial dissertation project with the Registers of Scotland to celebrate its 400th anniversary

Welcoming the Class of 2019

The first cohort of EPCC students to call the Bayes Centre ‘home’ is our Class of 2019: 36 students of 16 nationalities with backgrounds as diverse as biology, electrical engineering, economics, computer science, and physics.

Induction Week proved to be a new experience for students, as they familiarised themselves with the

programmes and their new city, and also staff, who were acclimatising to teaching in the new location of the University’s Central Area. EPCC has always welcomed students into the heart of the centre’s community and the design of our space in the Bayes Centre emphasises this, with our MSc and PhD students having study space in the building and sharing facilities with staff.

Curriculum changes

As well as enjoying new facilities, the Class of 2019 will be our first cohort to take the programmes’ newly streamlined Degree Programme Table and four new optional courses (see EPCC News 83 for details).

Staffing Update

The increased size of the MSc programmes necessitated a larger student support team and we are delighted to welcome Arno Proeme, Darren White, Weronika Filinger (an MSc in HPC alumna), and Jane Kennedy (a second-generation member of EPCC staff) as Personal Tutors.

An update on our MSc programmes in High Performance Computing (HPC) and HPC with Data Science.

Left: Students of the Class of 2019 during Induction Week. Image: Mario Antonioletti.

Above: Part of the MSc students’ new communal work area in the Bayes Centre. Image: Mark Reynolds.

Farewell to the class of 2018The class of 2018 graduated in November, with 20 students completing the programme. We wish them well in their next endeavours, which range from PhDs within the University to careers with multinational companies. One of the class of 2018 has already become a Teaching Assistant on the programme, while two members of TeamEPCC at this year’s ISC Student Cluster Competition have returned to talk to the current class about their exploits and encourage those who might follow in their footsteps at ISC 2019.

Ben Morse, EPCCb.morse@epcc.ed.ac.uk

Read about our MSc programmes, including our industry-based projects, on the EPCC website: www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/msc

15The newsletter of EPCC, the supercomputing centre at the University of Edinburgh

Online learning at EPCC

David Henty and Jane Kennedy, EPCCd.henty@epcc.ed.ac.ukj.kennedy@epcc.ed.ac.uk

Our online learning options allow you to study with us wherever you are in the world.

Supercomputing MOOC In Summer 2017, EPCC in collaboration with SURFsara in the The Netherlands launched the first Supercomputing MOOC on the FutureLearn platform.

Massively open online courses (MOOCs) are free courses delivered over a relatively short period. This, plus the mode of delivery through videos, articles, and discussion forums, means they can be run even with a very large audience, (hence ‘massive’). The number of participants for the latest run of our Supercomputing MOOC was smaller than for previous iterations, however we still had over 900 people register in 95 countries.

There is no programming required or involved in the course. Instead concepts such as message passing and shared memory are explained using simple analogies that are easier for non-technical learners to visualise and understand. For example, Amdahl’s Law is explained by looking at the speed-up when travelling via Concorde versus a jumbo jet over varying distances but with fixed times for check-in, travel to and from the airport, and so on.

In addition to parallel programming, our Supercomputing MOOC also covers HPC hardware, from the basics of computer hardware to examining a blade from HECToR, the UK’s previous supercomputing

service. The final week consolidates learning by going through several HPC case studies. In particular, the topic of Quantum Computing captured the imagination of this cohort!

Technical online coursesEPCC is also starting to deliver more technical courses online. Complementing the long-running series of ARCHER Virtual Tutorials (usually held at 3pm on the second Wednesday of each month), we now run parallel programming courses using the Blackboard Collaborate webinar system to deliver live audio and video, and enable interaction with remote attendees via chat sessions.

In 2018 we ran both the MPI and OpenMP courses online, with attendees given access to EPCC’s Tier2 HPC system, Cirrus, for practical sessions. Sessions are typically run over four consecutive Wednesday afternoons with around two hours of lecture content per week. The format is designed to give attendees time to attempt the hands-on practical exercises in the gap between each session, and we spend time reviewing the previous exercises at the start of each week. The ability to easily share the presenter’s screen means that we can do live coding sessions to explain key points from the exercises or to answer questions.

Our free 5-week Supercomputing MOOC is designed for anyone interested in leading-edge computing technology. Registrations are open for the next run (start date to be confirmed). See: www.futurelearn.com/courses/supercomputing

Our MPI and OpenMP courses will run again in 2019. See the ARCHER training pages for information, also for details of upcoming face-to-face training evens and virtual tutorials: www.archer.ac.uk/training/

Read about all our online offerings at: www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/online-learning

Image: FutureLearn

16

The SpiNNaker communication fabric takes a very different approach to normal HPC systems. It is designed to be efficient in sending small data packets very quickly to many places, instead of the standard approach of large blocks of data to be sent to a few places periodically. With HPC systems becoming more multi-core systems, a platform such as SpiNNaker is in an interesting position to explore massive parallel designs.

As each SpiNNaker chip is benched at 1W, the entire one-million core machine utilises approx. 140kw of power, when taking into account the cooling and the FPGAs that each board uses to create the torus-shaped communication fabric. This is a magnitude lower power than HPC systems for the same processor capability, and is a step towards future HPC systems, which need to reduce the power used to operate them in today’s culture. Applications that work efficiently on the SpiNNaker machine are likely to also work well when ported back to traditional HPC systems, as SpiNNaker forces the user to think about their problem in a distributed fashion

from the get go. This all makes SpiNNaker a very interesting environment to work with.

SpiNNaker at the Bayes

The SpiNNaker machine directly available to users in the Bayes is a three-board toroid, which provides the user with up to 2304 Arm cores to work with as shown in the image here.

Any user who requires more resources can get access to the half million cores currently available from Manchester University. This machine will have grown to one million cores by the end of the year.

Current plans for use of the SpiNNaker platform at the Bayes include supporting research into executing MicroPython in a distributed fashion, as well as supporting the standard users in computational neuroscience. Please keep an eye out for Masters projects which will use the SpiNNaker platform for a multitude of uses.

[1] Full-scale simulation of a cortical microcircuit on SpiNNaker.

[2] ATIS + SpiNNaker: a Fully Event-based Visual Tracking Demonstration.

[3] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/spinnakerusers

[4] http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~stokesa6/

The SpiNNaker neuromorphic high-performance computing platform, which aims to run 1% of the human brain in real time, arrived at EPCC this year. SpiNNaker is a novel hardware platform due to its massive parallelism, multi-cast communication fabric and low power design.

Alan Stokes, School of Computing Science, University of Manchesterstokesa6@cs.man.ac.uk

Find out moreTo learn about SpiNNaker or how to utilise the platform speak to me directly, or contact the SpiNNaker team through the user mailing list: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/spinnakerusers

http://apt.cs.manchester.ac.uk/projects/SpiNNaker/

http://apt.cs.manchester.ac.uk/ftp/pub/apt/papers/LAP_IEEEDandT_07.pdf

SpiNNaker arrives at EPCC

Alan Stokes and the SpiNNaker machine at EPCC in the Bayes Centre. Alan will be at the Bayes for three weeks each month.

17The newsletter of EPCC, the supercomputing centre at the University of Edinburgh

Built in the 1970s and operated by EPCC since the turn of the millennium, the ACF site has had significant investment over the years. At present, there are three Computer Rooms, imaginatively called: Computer Room 1 (CR1), Computer Room 2 (CR2), and Computer Room 3 (CR3).

Each hosts specific HPC equipment and is supported by associated plant rooms which provide dedicated power and cooling infrastructure for each room. We have several pieces of equipment and racks at our site which are “traditionally” air cooled, but the majority of our equipment and speciality high-performance computers are water cooled.

Yes. Water and electricity!

Thanks to the Scottish climate, for much of the year the ACF benefits from something called free cooling. The water which supports our cooling infrastructure is pumped to our roof-mounted dry air cooling towers and back again, allowing the (cold!) outside temperature to cool our water as it passes through them. It is only on extremely warm summer days when there is no free cooling and we need to use our large-scale mechanical chillers to cool the water circuits.

Alongside the management of the data centre with our Data Centre

Manager Calum Muir, I also have overall responsibility for the HPC Systems team who design, build, commission, host and support a number of HPC systems within the ACF, including the National Tier 1 and Tier 2 systems, ARCHER and Cirrus, to name a few.

We have the experience and skills to help continue to deliver future systems and projects, and relish working at the bleeding edge of technology and innovation.

As an example (as EPCC Director Mark Parsons explained in EPCC News 83), the University of Edinburgh and EPCC will play a major role in the Edinburgh and South East Scotland City Region Deal by delivering the deal’s Data-Driven Innovation Programme.

At the heart of this programme is the World-Class Data Infrastructure (WCDI). This is the development and delivery of a new, state-of-the-art computer room at the ACF to accommodate the underpinning infrastructure for the City Region Deal.

This will be called, you’ve guessed it, Computer Room 4 (CR4)!

Future editions of EPCC News will provide updates to this exciting project and the development of our future masterplan.

Paul Clark, EPCCp.clark@epcc.ed.ac.uk

The Advanced Computing Facility (ACF) on the outskirts of Edinburgh is the high performance computing data centre of EPCC.

Any data centre is an exercise in thermodynamics – a computer turns electrical energy into heat energy as it runs, which in turn has to be managed and cooled. By utilising water to help with the cooling process of the machines, which is significantly more effective than air alone, the ACF is an extremely efficient data centre.

On the frontline of energy-efficient computing

One of the ACF’s roof-mounted dry air cooling towers.

18

Hardware designers are trying innovative designs and novel hardware options such as the new tensor unit in Volta GPUs, compute-in-network capabilities, and several new technologies for memory – HBM, NVM, storage class memory and others. Future supercomputers will combine all of these specialised hardware components to create general-purpose computing resources, but how much of this complexity should be exposed to, and controlled by, programmers? What will that new functionality look like? How can we get high performance of applications and high efficiency of resource usage?

The vision of the EPiGRAM-HS project is to enable extreme scale applications on heterogeneous hardware. This means figuring out how to use new hardware capabilities and how to combine different components to get the best result. Together we will look at the challenge from four directions: network, memory, compute, and applications.

EPCC will focus on exploiting heterogeneity for high performance communication, building on proven programming models. We will use the newly standardised interface for persistent collective operations in MPI to implement efficient high-level communication patterns. Here the aim is to hide as much of the hardware complexity as possible and instead give the user access to a high-level abstraction. The goal is

to give high performance but avoid requiring the user to know about, or deal with, the intimate details of each piece of novel hardware in each machine. Other partners will investigate how MPI and GPI can be used directly on GPUs and FPGAs.

In collaboration with other partners, EPCC will also help to define suitable abstractions for memory usage, and create a unified interface applicable to all memory and storage devices. The intention is that this will make programming easier because code will be more portable, even between hardware devices and components with vastly different capabilities.

A further technical challenge in the project is how to integrate novel compute hardware such as FPGAs. This is partly a scheduling problem: on which compute device should each piece of code execute? And partly it is an API design choice: how should novel compute capability be exposed to programmers?

All of the work at the programming model level and on prototype implementations will be validated using real applications. The partners have expertise in traditional HPC applications like Nek5000, iPIC3D, and IFS, and also in data science applications like lung cancer detection using TensorFlow. The project will also push for changes to international standards to support heterogeneous systems.

Dan Holmes, EPCCd.holmes@epcc.ed.ac.uk

Supercomputers are getting more complex. Faster components would be impossible to cool but, by doing more with less, we can still solve bigger problems faster than ever before.

The EPiGRAM-HS project is part of the EU’s Horizon 2020. The project partners are: KTH, ETH, EPCC, Fraunhofer, Cray, and ECMWF.

To stay up to date with the project, please subscribe to our quarterly newsletter by visiting our website:

https://epigram-hs.eu

Making complex machines easier to use efficiently

© iStock.com/matejmo

19The newsletter of EPCC, the supercomputing centre at the University of Edinburgh

The last of the Calls has now closed and all funding has been allocated. Although a number of projects are still on-going, this seems a good time to review the benefits of the programme and to see whether its aims have been met.

The programme aimed to:

• Enhance the quality, quantity and range of science produced on the ARCHER service through improved software.

• Develop the computational science skills base, and provide expert assistance embedded within research communities, across the UK.

• Provide an enhanced and sustainable set of HPC software for UK science. 

To achieve this we set out to provide a high quality, fair and objective eCSE selection process, delivering maximum value to the community. Selection was made by a series of independent panel members, we had regular Calls, and the programme was not-for-profit, with all funds being spent on projects. In total, 46 institutions were involved across 100 eCSE projects.

A key outcome of the eCSE programme relates to people. We aim to develop the computational

science skills base and provide expert assistance and high quality RSE work embedded within research communities across the UK. As the map (right) shows, technical staff have been spread all across the UK.

Enhancing the quality, quantity and range of science produced on the ARCHER service is obviously core to the programme. Scientific output and impact will continue to be delivered throughout the lifetime of the ARCHER service and beyond, hence the full scientific benefit of the programme will not be known and realised for some time. However one metric we can measure is the financial saving achieved from a number of projects. Many projects involved performance optimisation, resulting in a reduction in CPU utilisation and a related financial saving. This saving is re-invested to allow scientists to achieve more science from the same resource allocation.

Carrying out these measurements is tricky, but helps demonstrate the value of investment in software development and research software engineering. Overall the eCSE programme cost around £6m and to date we have seen a reported benefit of around £21m, a more than three times return on investment.

eCSE programme: funding software development for UK computational science

The embedded Computational Science and Engineering (eCSE) programme has allocated funding to the UK computational science community over a period of six years. Integral to ARCHER, the National HPC Service, there has been a series of regular eCSE Calls to fund software development activities.

Lorna Smith, EPCCl.smith@epcc.ed.ac.uk

Embedded CSE webpagesFor further information and project reports, see:

www.archer.ac.uk/community/eCSE/

Hull University’s VOX-FE is a bespoke bone modelling software tool for in silico experiments such as testing bone growth under stressed conditions. The eCSE programme enabled EPCC to work with Richard Fagan at Hull to greatly improve VOX-FE’s modelling capabilities on machines such as ARCHER.

The location of the technical members of staff on all eCSe projects, with darker colours representing a greater number of people.

20

PickCells provides a graphical environment within which biologists can study multidimensional biological images and explore 3D spatial relationships between objects within complex biological systems such as stem cell niches, organoids, and embryos.

Since January 2018, EPCC has been working with CRM on the development of the platform and its supporting resources.

My EPCC colleagues Elena Breitmoser, Arno Proeme and myself worked with CRM’s Sally Lowell and Guillaume Blin to take PickCells into a state suitable for more widespread promotion with the intention of encouraging deeper community engagement by users and developers. We focused on creating a website for users, developers and contributors and providing consultancy on developing and supporting open source software.

PickCells is highly-modular, and the documentation for each component is held within the associated source code repository for that component. These source code repositories are hosted by Framagit, a deployment of GitLab for free open source software. A website framework was

developed using the Hugo static website generator to render content, and GitLab’s continuous integration functionality, GitLab CI, is used to trigger rebuilds of the website in response to any changes in documentation held within any of the source code repositories.

During our collaboration, Sally secured a Wellcome Trust “enrichment” award to support further collaboration on PickCells. This next phase of work, which began in September, seeks to improve the usability of PickCells for biologists who wish to extract information from their imaging data.

Our objectives are to:

• develop an in-application interactive assistant to help users get started with analyses using PickCells filter information

• produce video tutorials

• undertake a usability evaluation of PickCells

• update PickCells and its supporting resources based upon the outcomes of this usability evaluation.

We look forward to reporting on our experiences in a future post.

Exploratory image analysis in cell biology

PickCells is an image analysis platform developed by the Centre for Regenerative Medicine (CRM) at The University of Edinburgh. It combines generic image analysis algorithms, visualisation modules and data mining functionality within a stand-alone Java application.

Mike Jackson, EPCCm.jackson@epcc.ed.ac.uk

The PickCells website is still in development, but please feel free to visit it at:

https://pickcellslab.frama.io/docs/

Our work was funded by the Wellcome Trust Institutional Strategic Support Fund and The Software Sustainability Institute.

© iStock.com/the-lightwriter

21The newsletter of EPCC, the supercomputing centre at the University of Edinburgh

EPCC was one of the original founders of WHPC, and the introduction of the Chapter and affiliate pilot programme is a source of pride, particularly as this will allow WHPC knowledge, expertise and activities to be tailored to the needs of local HPC communities.

EPCC has a long established commitment to encouraging diversity in computational science and STEM. We are committed to inclusivity and supporting young

people to consider careers in STEM, no matter their gender identity, sexual orientation, social background or ethnicity. Becoming a WHPC Chapter will allow us to apply WHPC tools and expertise to the pursuit of our diversity goals, which also align with the goals of WHPC.

We will keep you updated on progress over the coming months. WHPC is stewarded by EPCC at the University of Edinburgh.

EPCC is now a Women in HPC Chapter

To find out more or to become involved, please get in contact at info@epcc.ed.ac.uk

Further information on Women in HPC and the Chapter programme can be found at: https://womeninhpc.org/chapters-and-affiliates/

HPC-Europa Transnational Access Meeting (TAM 2018)

Lorna Smith, EPCCl.smith@epcc.ed.ac.uk

We are very pleased to have been accepted as a Women in HPC (WHPC) Chapter, a community-level group that fulfils the WHPC mission locally.

Attendees each presented the results of their HPC-Europa project and, with topics ranging from pure computing research to applied computational science, the programme’s multidisciplinary nature was well represented. Computational chemistry was the most common area, but it is clear that HPC is becoming increasingly important in the life sciences, especially those focused on health and drug design.

The Best Talk Award was given to José Carlos Romero Moreno (University of Málaga) for “Time series collaborative execution on CPU+GPU chips”, while the Best Poster Award went to Daniele Dragoni (University of Milano-Bicocca) for “An artificial Neural Network potential for Sb”.

The full list of talks and posters can be found at: www.hpc-europa.eu/tam-agenda

Participants of TAM 2018, the HPC-Europa3 Transnational Access Meeting.

There are four HPC-Europa3 closing dates per year, with the next one on February 21st 2019.

www.hpc-europa.org

Catherine Inglis, EPCCc.inglis@epcc.ed.ac.uk

HPC-Europa is an EC-funded programme which enables collaborative cross-border research visits using world-class HPC.

EPCC has now been welcoming visitors from the HPC-Europa3 programme for a year. To mark this we hosted the first user group meeting in Edinburgh in October.

22

Building a community of research software engineers

The aim of this meeting was to help build a self-sustaining community in Edinburgh that will be able to support its members and create a sense of community. Also, as with the wider national effort, to gain recognition for those who produce software as a research output, and establish a recognised career path within academic institutions. This effort is not limited to the University of Edinburgh: Heriot-Watt University and some commercial companies within Edinburgh are also involved.

But what is a research software engineer (RSE)? Many people in research organisations around the world combine expertise in programming with an intricate understanding of research. These people are research software engineers. Although this combination of skills is extremely valuable, RSEs often lack a formal career path, particularly in the academic system, because there is no easy way to recognise their contributions, reward them, or represent their views.

The UK RSE Association was formed in response. It believes:

• Career evaluation and progression structures need to be changed to better match RSE careers

• The value of research software should be recognised and its development placed on a par with research outputs

• The importance of RSEs to researchers, institutions and funders should be demonstrated.

Next steps

Next year the Association will be transformed into a charitable incorporated organisation – the Society of Research Software Engineering. This will allow the community to do more for the benefit of its members, supporting RSEs in all aspects of their role, from access to training and technical expertise, career progression advice and community events such as conferences and workshops.

Find out more

Society of Research Software Engineering: https://www.society-rse.org

RSE Association: https://rse.ac.uk

If the UK is to continue to be a major research leader, effort and resources must be invested in our research software engineers (RSEs). In recognition of this, a meeting of local RSEs was held at the Bayes Centre in September.

Some attendees of the first meeting of the Edinburgh Research Software Engineers group.

Mario Antonioletti, EPCCm.antonioletti@epcc.ed.ac.uk

To become involved with the Edinburgh local group, contact Mario or see:

Slack https://ukrse.slack.com/ (join #edinburgh)

Mailing list Ed-rse-community@jiscmail.ac.uk

GitHub https://cerse.github.io

Twitter https://twitter.com/cerse7

23The newsletter of EPCC, the supercomputing centre at the University of Edinburgh

Managing your EPCC subscriptionsTo subscribe to the print or electronic version of EPCC News, to join our Events mailing list, or to be removed from any EPCC mailing list, simply email your request to info@epcc.ed.ac.uk

www.epcc.ed.ac.uk info@epcc.ed.ac.uk +44 (0)131 650 5030 Twitter: @EPCCed

EPCC is a supercomputing centre based at The University of Edinburgh, which is a charitable body registered in Scotland with registration number SC005336.

New Scientist Live is a large, interactive science festival, with hundreds of speakers and exhibitors from a wide range of disciplines. At the EPCC stand we had a bean-bag sorting game to demonstrate the benefits and limitations of parallel programming, Wee Archie (our Raspberry Pi-based mini-supercomputer) running our aircraft wing-design demonstration, and a Cray XC30 board like those found in ARCHER.

Many of our visitors were groups of schoolchildren looking for entertainment, and it was easy to get larger groups to participate in the bean-bag sorting to demonstrate resource contention, no matter how competitive the participants. Another exhibitor commented on how good it was to see young people having fun while learning about computers. There were some wacky wing designs too – however, the children were good listeners, and it was easy to relate what we were talking about to the science they were learning in school.

The venue reached full capacity at the weekend, with a sell-out show on the Saturday. Our proximity to the Technology Stage meant we were well placed to attract a lot of traffic, so all six of us were kept busy chatting to visitors. By Sunday, people were laughing as our poor tired brains struggled to do simple mental arithmetic when adding up sorting scores. We were still going right to the very end of the festival, when security guards were asking the last stragglers to leave.

While the bean-bag sorting game was our most popular demonstration this year, we think the most fun and beneficial part of attending events like New Scientist Live is simply chatting to members of the public about what we do.

We had a lot of fun this year, and I hope visitors to our stand did too. Hopefully some of them even learned something new about computing.

If you met us at NSL and have a question we weren’t able to answer, or simply want to talk further, please do get in touch at info@epcc.ed.ac.uk

The EPCC Outreach team had a very successful and enjoyable trip to New Scientist Live in London in September.

Oliver Brown, EPCC o.brown@epcc.ed.ac.uk

EPCC at New Scientist Live

The set construction team: Gordon (left), Jane and Oliver.

24

Study HPC in the heart of the city

Master’s degrees in High Performance Computing (HPC)

and in HPC with Data Science

EPCC is the UK’s leading supercomputing centre. We are a major provider of HPC training in Europe, and have an international reputation

for excellence in HPC education and research.

www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/msc

Image: Paul Dodds

Our MSc programmes in High Performance Computing (HPC) and HPC with Data Science have a strong practical focus and provide access to leading edge systems such as ARCHER (the UK’s National HPC Service), and Cirrus (an EPSRC Tier-2 National HPC facility).

MSc students have the opportunity to undertake their dissertations as an industrial project, building on EPCC’s strong business links. Recent project partners range from start-ups to multinationals.

Programmes are taught in the heart of Edinburgh, with brand new student facilities for 2018/19. Optional course choices include modules from the School of Informatics and the wider College of Science and Engineering.

Our graduates are in high demand in both academia and industry in the UK and abroad.

The University of Edinburgh is ranked in the top 30 universities in the world by both Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2018 and QS World University Rankings 2018.

“Studying the MSc in HPC at EPCC has given me the benefit of a thorough practical grounding in supercomputing and the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to participate in the Student Cluster Competition at ISC High Performance 2018, alongside the wider opportunities afforded by the student experience at the University and in the city of Edinburgh.”

Wilson Lisan, 2017/18 MSc in HPC student

“Modules covered the full range of HPC and Data Science skill sets from core ‘best-practice’ ways of working to the latest technologies. These were well-structured and delivered at a good pace by lecturers who were more than happy to engage in discussion in response to questions.”

Dr Andy Law, Roslin Institute,2017 MSc in HPC with Data Science graduate