EPCC Guest Lectures

Iain Bethune (ibethune@exseed.ed.ac.uk)
  • 0.0 (0)
  • COURSES

EPCC and the MSc in High Performance Computing run an annual Guest Lecture series, with speakers drawn from industry and academia. Talks focus on state-of-the-art applications of HPC in real world situations, with many reflecting the type of work our MSc students will undertake after graduation. www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/msc twitter.com/#!/EPCCedinburgh

  1. 03/21/2014

    Adventures in the Biology trade : Bioinformatics in the Petabyte era (60 mins, ~42 MB)

    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. Talk slides

    1 hr

  2. 03/14/2014

    Solar analysis - the journey from two weeks to one hour with HPC (38 mins, ~24 MB)

    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. Talk slides

    38 min

  3. 02/28/2014

    High Performance Computing - Driving innovation and capability: Ian Wardrope, Intel (55 mins, ~40 MB)

    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. Talk slides

    55 min

  4. 09/07/2013

    PrimeGrid: Join in the search for a world record prime number (45 mins, ~41 MB)

    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. Talk slides

    45 min

  5. 04/02/2013

    The Power of Many: Running Many Simulations on Many : Dr. Shantenu Jha, Rutgers University (57 mins, ~28 MB)

    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. Talk slides

    57 min

  6. 03/22/2013

    Games: Playing with Threads: Ben Nicholson, Frontier Developments (53 mins, ~21 MB)

    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. Talk slides Videos

    53 min

  7. 03/15/2013

    Fast as Lightning: High Performance Computing at the Met Office: Dr. Chris Maynard, Met Office (59 mins, ~27 MB)

    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. Talk slides

    59 min

  8. 03/01/2013

    Data Centric Deep Computing: Dr. Crispin Keable, IBM (59 mins, ~27 MB)

    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. Talk slides

    59 min
See All (19)

About

EPCC and the MSc in High Performance Computing run an annual Guest Lecture series, with speakers drawn from industry and academia. Talks focus on state-of-the-art applications of HPC in real world situations, with many reflecting the type of work our MSc students will undertake after graduation. www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/msc twitter.com/#!/EPCCedinburgh

Information

  • Creator
    Iain Bethune (ibethune@exseed.ed.ac.uk)
  • Years Active
    2011 - 2014
  • Episodes
    19
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © (c) 2017, The University of Edinburgh
  • Show Website
    EPCC Guest Lectures

More From The University of Edinburgh