There are several EPSRC HPC (high performance computing) calls out at the moment which researchers should be aware of. If you would like to apply to any of them Research IT is able to help with the preparation of applications.

The Computational Shared Facility (CSF) has now officially come of age - it has reached an amazing 10,000 CPU cores - with around 4000 cores of Haswell / Broadwell and a Skylake procurement coming up in January.

Would you like to be able to explore climate models and visualise their output? A new web-based tool from Prof David Schultz’s research group in the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, allows you to do just that. The research team consisting of Jonathan Fairman, Stuart Anderson, and Sharon Gardner, developed the “Build Your Own Earth” model using the computational power provided by N8 HPC, the regional computing platform accessed and supported through Research IT.

EPSRC is offering open access to five new Tier-2 High Performance Computing facilities through a call for proposals. Free access to the facilities is through a two stage peer review process with an initial closing date of the 21st of September. There will only be three calls a year for access to the facilities.

EPSRC have recently launched a survey open to all HPC users regardless of funding body, to try and understand the range of skills across the UK HPC community and the training needed to fill those skills gaps. If you use the local CSF, N8 HPC, ARCHER or any non-desktop system then read on!

Dr William Sellers from the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences has been hitting the headlines with his discovery that Tyrannosaurus rex was unable move faster than a gentle jog, let alone run. The research looks extensively into the gait and biomechanics of the world’s most famous dinosaur and, using the external HPC resources accessed through and supported by Research IT, has created a new simulation model to test its findings.

PRACE has recently announced its 15^th Call for Proposals for Project Access. The current call provides access to various European Tier 0 systems from Bull, Cray, Lenovo and IBM. These comprise a mixture of standard x86, Knights Landing and GPU platforms. Joint submissions from academia and industry are particularly welcome.

Our flagship computational facility, The CSF, is currently only available to those researchers contributing funds to the platform. However we are pleased to announce that our recent case to provide limited free-at-the-point-of-use computational resource to users without funds, particularly for those who are not computational specialists, has been successful.

Would you like to improve the performance of your applications on ARCHER?

This course on “Single Node Performance Optimisation” will cover the main features of modern HPC nodes, including multiple cores, vector floating point units, deep cache hierarchies, and NUMA memory systems.

Save the date: 14-15 December 2016Location: Manchester Central Convention Complex, Manchester, UK

STFC are lining up an exciting programme of speakers for you at CIUK 2016, ready to highlight the way high performance computing, data-centric and cognitive technologies are accelerating research, boosting business and changing the world around us.

The HPC Short Courses Consortium Fifth Autumn Academy for High Performance Computing (HPC) will be held at the University of Cambridge from the 12^th to 23^rd September.

It’s an intensive two-week course designed to train researchers to start modifying and developing effective and efficient code for applications in HPC. It is suitable for any researcher who has some familiarity with programming and would like to start modifying and/or writing code for use on mid and high performance computer resources.

Research IT have recently launched a new initiative to assist researchers at the University of Manchester – the eResearch platforms partner network.