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business innovation through high performance computing Giving your business a competitive edge in today’s global markets relies on innovation in your products or services. Whether it’s a desire to improve a product or service or design a new one, many companies around the world are turning to modelling and simulation on high performance computers to give them that edge. Supercomputing Scotland is a new initiative from EPCC at The University of Edinburgh and Scottish Enterprise to give companies the knowledge to help them decide if using high performance computing (HPC) makes sense for them, and if so, to support them to proceed. The three-year programme is targeting companies from the Energy, Life Sciences and Financial Services sectors, but will consider engaging with any company on a case-by-case basis.
hpc expertise made in scotland Through EPCC, the supercomputing centre at The University of Edinburgh, Scotland has a world-leading centre of excellence in HPC. EPCC manages an unrivalled collection of HPC systems including HECToR, the UK’s £115 million national supercomputing services – one of the world’s largest computers – a 90,112 processor Cray XE6. With 70 staff, EPCC has over 21 years experience of working with industry and commerce, from blue-chip multinationals to local small and medium sized companies, to solve real business challenges and deliver commercial advantage. Bringing together a company’s knowledge of its business and market with EPCC’s understanding of HPC will enable opportunities to be identified and exploited.
what can supercomputing scotland offer scottish companies? The starting point is an initial meeting where EPCC and Scottish Enterprise will meet with you to discuss what potential there is for HPC to help your business. If appropriate, this will be followed by a detailed feasibility study and subsequently by a bid for Scottish Enterprise support for an HPC Adopter Project. This project will enable your company to become a confident user of HPC and to demonstrate its immediate benefits to your business.
EXAMPLES OF SCOTTISH COMPANIES SUCCESSFULLY USING HPC TODAY Prospect Aberdeen based Prospect, is a leading global provider of engineering design and analysis services to the world’s energy sector. The company makes extensive use of computational modelling and has a modest in-house HPC system on which they run most of their simulations. With their in-house system constrained by lack of memory and number of processors, working with EPCC allowed them to tackle larger, more complex engineering problems and deliver faster results to their clients. By simulating an offshore wind turbine – a difficult simulation too computationally complex to analyse using their existing computing facilities – EPCC enabled Prospect to demonstrate a new capability to its client base thereby expanding the range of services it provides to its customers.
Fios Genomics Modern gene sequencing techniques produce huge volumes of data. Fios Genomics, an Edinburgh biotechnology company, use advanced algorithmic approaches to interpret these genetic fingerprints, but were limited in their ability to deal with very large datasets by their in-house codes and resources. Working with EPCC enabled them to run portions of their code on HECToR, not only vastly speeding up the process but also enabling them to run much larger projects than previously possible. Access to the HECToR service on-demand has removed the need for them to build up their own computational resources.
Partrac Patrac is a Glasgow based marine data acquisition business employing the expertise of EPCC and Glasgow University to simulate the flow dynamics within a novel marine instrument developed by the company. The simulations were produced using HECToR and commercial software and reduced their costs whilst also dramatically speeding up the design process.
the first step is to contact us
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www.supercomputingscotland.org