UK HPC support for academics restructured

 London 18 Jan 00 Daresbury Laboratory and university of Edinburgh are collaborating with university of Manchester to provide HPC support to academic researchers in the UK. This restructuring is part of the funding approved by the UK research council EPSRC for the next three years. The approved funding contains two strands: Ongoing dedicated support for research groups and HPCI Consortia with existing grants and for individual research groups applying for new grants at the three institutions Daresbury, EPCC or CSAR.

Support for the existing scientific consortia is continuing at Daresbury and EPCC until their current research grants end. In addition to this consortia previously mapped to Southampton have been re-assigned to either Daresbury or EPCC as follows:

  • Daresbury: Materials Chemistry (Prof. Catlow, RI), DNS of Fluids (Prof. Sandham, Southampton), Liquid Crystals (Prof. Allen, Bristol),
  • EPCC: UGAMP (Prof. O'Neill, Reading) OCCAM (Dr. Webb, Southampton), Geophysics (Prof. Price, Birkbeck).

Future requests to EPSRC for dedicated support for individual research groups should be made to the appropriate Research Council. Other research councils are currently making their own arrangements.

What about Core support

EPSRC is also funding, a core activity to track and disseminate information on developing standards in software and tools and to promote good programming practices. This is to be undertaken by the "UK-HEC Collaboration", group from Daresbury, EPCC and the Manchester Research Centre for Computational Science (MRCCS).

The UK-HEC Collaboration will investigate underlying HPC issues relating to hardware and software technology which might enhance the effective use of HPC resources in the UK. This includes programming languages (e.g. C, Java, Fortran95), software engineering and QA, data management, visualisation and VR, and meta-computing. Technical reports will be produced and short courses and workshops held in key areas. Information will be announced via HPCProfile and the Web pages ).

New HPCI Web pages and HPCProfile

EPCC and Daresbury Laboratory are collaborating to develop new Web pages with appropriate URLs for their diverse HPC activities. Links to all the supported consortia and related activities will be provided via these pages. HPCProfile will also be revamped, reduced to two issues a year, devoted to HPC programming techniques and underlying computing issues. This will be supplemented by other material which will provide information on the dedicated consortium support, CCPs and Distributed Computing Programme (DisCo).

Further Information

In addition to looking at the existing Web pages you can contact:

Robert Allan, at Daresbury Laboratory, email: r.j.allan@dl.ac.uk, Web site, www.cse.clrc.ac.uk/Activity/HPCI

David Henty, at Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre, email: d.s.henty@epcc.ed.ac.uk, Web site, www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/t3e/hpci

Terry Hewitt, at Manchester Computing, email: w.t.hewitt@mcc.ac.uk, Web sites, www.man.ac.uk/mrccs , or www.csar.cfs.ac.uk

 

Chris Lazou

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