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 High Energy Physics or Astrophysics in that they tend to gathered from a wide variety of different providers. Meta-analyses of these data sets can give startling new insights but come with many caveats - in particular that the quality of the data from each provider can be highly variable. I will spend some time talking about one set of experiences I have dealing with one specific technology platform and in particular how it is clear that the detection of bias in data sets is a key element of any high-throughput analysis.

This talk was given as part of our MSc in HPC's 'HPC Ecosystem' course.

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 EPCC to apply HPC practices to the solar analysis algorithm and benchmark results will be presented. Additionally we will cover the pitfalls found when integrating the MPI solution in a commercial environment and how we addressed these.

The presentation will conclude with a brief description of in-progress and potential future developments with EPCC.

This talk was given as part of our MSc in HPC's 'HPC Ecosystem' course.

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 provide industry and academia with a competitive advantage.

This talk was given as part of our MSc in HPC's 'HPC Ecosystem' course.

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 for large primes (and a little of the maths!), and show the audience how they can use their computers to join PrimeGrid and find new primes of their own.

This talk was given at the British Science Festival on Sat 7th September 2013 by Iain Bethune of EPCC.

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 supercomputing centers, have supported and priortised the execution of single "jobs" on supercomputers. Not suprisingly, the tools and capabilities to support coordinated multiple simulations are limited.

A promising way to overcome this common limitation is the use of a Pilot-Job --- which can be defined as a container or placeholder job to provide multi-level scheduling via an application-level scheduling overlay over the system scheduler. We discuss both the theory and practise of Pilot-Jobs: Specifically, we introduce the P* Model of Pilot-Jobs and present "BigJob" as a SAGA-based extensible, interopable and scalable implementation of the P* Model. We then discuss several science problems that have/are using BigJob to execute multiple simulations at unprecedented scales on a range of supercomputers and distributed supercomputing infrastructure such as XSEDE.

This talk was given as part of our MSc in HPC's 'HPC Ecosystem' course.

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 architectures.

This talk was given as part of our MSc in HPC's 'HPC Ecosystem' course.

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 computational challenges lie ahead will be discussed.

This talk was given as part of our MSc in HPC's 'HPC Ecosystem' course.

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 industry has become more focused on problems involving the use and management of large data sets (Big Data) and we map this trend on to the consequences of Exascale computing. What will future architectures look like, how will they be used, and what does that mean for applications development today?

This talk was given as part of our MSc in HPC's 'HPC Ecosystem' course.

Building design has been revolutionised in recent years. New materials and better construction techniques have allowed bespoke and

impressive 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 buildings, with regular layouts and

dimensions, there is very little experience to suggest how fires might develop in these spaces, and how people might react in an emergency

situation.

An Edinburgh-led consortium, called FireGrid, is developing technology designed to tackle this specific problem head-on. By combining advanced modelling with sensor data, in a high performance computing (HPC) context, the FireGrid team are developing a system that can provide fire fighters with better

information to support their response, to control the impact of a fire emergency, and to reduce the risk to life and property.

In this talk we will review progress of the FireGrid consortium and describe a technology prototype that has been built to demonstrate the

potential for such a system, and to stress some of the key technologies that are required.

This talk was given as part of our MSc in HPC's 'HPC Ecosystem' course.

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 architecture of a GPU has much to offer to the future of large-scale computing where energy-efficiency is paramount. NVIDIA is the lead contractor for the DARPA-funded Echelon project investigating efficient parallel computer architectures for the exascale era.

Timothy Lanfear is a Solution Architect in NVIDIA’s Professional Solutions Group, promoting the use of the NVIDIA Tesla(TM) computing solution for high-performance computing. He has twenty years’ experience in HPC, starting as a computational scientist in British Aerospace’s corporate research centre, and then moving to technical pre-sales roles with Hitachi, ClearSpeed, and most recently NVIDIA. He has a degree in Electrical Engineering and a PhD for research in the field of graph theory, both from Imperial College London.