EPCC: KT in novel
computing
Professor Arthur Trew
Director, EPCC
A.S.Trew@ed.ac.uk
+44 131 650 5025
leading Europe
• mission - “to be the premier European
computational science centre”
– the European equivalent of one of the big US centres, eg NCSA,
University of Chicago

• think globally, act locally

building the vision
• Vital statistics:
– 75 staff
– £4.5 M turnover (almost)European
all from external sources
leadership
• Multidisciplinary and multi-funded
– ... with a large spectrum of activities
– … and a critical mass of expertise
•
R&D
Training
Supports and
undertakes research
at UoE through:
excellence
– access to facilities
– training (MSc and some undergraduate)
Partnerships
– HPC-Europa
visitor programme
HPC
Dbase + Grid
–facilities+skills
collaborative research Industry
(eg NAIS, +
RealityGrid …
)
expertise
Academia
HECToR
• 4th generation national facility managed by Edinburgh
• HPCx + HECToR = £150M
• HECToR 250 Tflops peak
– Most powerful computer in UK academia
– shortly to be upgraded to 350 Tflops
• … used for a wide variety of physical, engineering,
environmental and biological projects
• … opportunities for industry involvement
– through facility access, or direct collaboration
win-win-win
the second age of parallelism
• the end of Moore’s law at the core level
multi-core chips ← parallelism → very many processors
Many-core era
Massively parallel applications
100
Increasing HW
Threads
Per Socket
Multi-core era
Scalar and parallel applications
10
HT
1
2003
2005
2007
2009
2011
2013
• … today’s top-end HPC techniques will have widespread
applicability tomorrow
making an economic impact
• projects based on delivering business
benefit
Academic
R&D
– not pushing a particular technology
`
– based within the University we have access to a
wide range of leading-edge expertise
• … on time, on budget and to specification
• we now need to diversify from bespoke
consultancy
• EPCC Industry Hub to be launched in 2009
– use ISV’s to target wider markets
– make facilities available as a paying service
– seeking SE and industry support
Commercial
exploitation
The challenges
• the end of (not) Moore’s Law
– levels of parallelism may increase, but can we use it?
– will, say, MPI scale to Exascale?
– how can we create fault-tolerant applications?
– is there really an economic basis for HPC based on commodity
components?
• escalating infrastructure costs
– power, space, cooling …
• verification of results
– rigorous testing of QCD has shown numerous hardware problems
– choosing appropriate algorithms essential
– widespread training required if computational science can truly stand
alongside theory and experiment
… and our response
• Exascale Technology Centre
– funded by the University in collaboration with Cray to investigate key
scalability problems
– hybrid programming models
– PGAS languages
– GPU-based architectures
• Numerical Algorithms & Intelligent Software (NAIS)
– collaboration with Numerical Analysts and Computer Scientists
– 5-year project to develop new algorithms designed to be parallel
– written to be WORA (Write-Once, Run-Anywhere)
– … with increased information to aid the compiler to generate
highly-efficient code
• high-impact demonstrators
– eg. real-time simulation of fire spread in the Olympic Stadium
the need for partnership
• the Exascale challenge is beyond any one institution
• … perhaps even beyond any one country
• so, there is a clear desire to collaborate
• G8 funding call a clear opportunity to build on the TsukubaEdinburgh
– the scale may be small, but it will grow …
collaborationhttp://www.dfg.de/en/research_funding/international_cooperation/research_collaboration/g
8-initiative/index.html