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. Finally, we will introduce GIMPS and PrimeGrid, two large and well-known distributed prime search projects.

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There is a plethora of version control systems and it is not obvious which to choose. Do

you 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 hope to convince you that modern systems are at least as good as CVS and Subversion, and to indicate some of the areas in which they make a programmer's life much, much easier.

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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 cloud” or building internal clouds to cater for their IT needs. Gihan Munasinghe & Tabassum Sharif of Flexiant discuss the advantages of having cloud infrastructures, introduce Flexiscale and look into how you can build your own internal cloud infrastructure.

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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 innovative features, such as adaptive re-meshing, a user friendly interface, and a python interface. The main advantage Fluidity has is the adaptive re-meshing, which allows resolution to be focused where and when it is required during a simulation, depending on the simulation state at that time. This talk will briefly cover some of the features and science behind Fluidity before covering details of AMCG’s software development methodologies and the parallel scaling behaviour of Fluidity on HECToR. Finally, future developments will be covered.

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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.

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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 media. This session will also discuss design considerations for such high performance systems, an overview of storage virtualization, and how these concepts are increasingly important with the move towards solid state storage media.

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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, particularly in the area of scalability, are presented and recent progress in these areas discussed.

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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 superscalar processors such as the Alpha. The talk also covers Very Long Instruction Word systems and SIMD systems. The talk is accompanied by visual demonstrations of the activities that occur within processors using simulation models developed using the HASE computer architecture simulation environment.

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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 computational challenges; and illustrates how GPUs are used here in Edinburgh.

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