STFC and the UK e-Infrastructure Initiative The Hartree Centre Prof. John Bancroft Project Director, the Hartree Centre Member, e-Infrastructure Leadership.

STFC

and the

UK e-Infrastructure Initiative

The Hartree Centre

Prof. John Bancroft

Project Director, the Hartree Centre

Member, e-Infrastructure Leadership Council (ELC)

• Political Opportunity

• Business Opportunity

• Scientific Opportunity

• Technical Opportunity

• Demonstrate growth through economic and societal impact from investments in high performance computing

• Engage industry in high performance computing simulation for competitive advantage

• Exploit multi-core.

• Exploit new Petascale and Exascale architectures

• Adapt to multi-core and hybrid architectures

• Build multi-scale, multi-physics coupled apps

• Tackle complex Grand Challenge problems

The Opportunities

UK e-Infrastructure Investment

~£160M of funding covering 6 strands

1. Skills and training

2. High capacity network

3. Data storage and curation

4. Advanced software development (£30M + £7.5M)

5. Security and resilience

6. HPC hardware• National facilities (ARCHER)• Distributed facilities (e.g. DiRAC)

STFC’s contribution to the e-infrastructure initiative

£10M of recurrent funding over 3 years, to pay for the running costs of the systems and the wages of the Hartree Centre staff

A home at Daresbury (with an offshoot at Harwell Oxford, and possibly more at other partner sites), dedicated to the development and demonstration of software, across all application areas, to enable full exploitation of the hardware provided in the e-infrastructure investment......

The Hartree Centre

The Centre has two main objectives:

1. To develop and deliver new software aimed at harnessing future hardware platforms to address grand challenge scientific problems

“to deliver future-proof software capable of exploiting the most powerful hardware platforms”.

2. The other is to develop and deliver new software aimed at making the use of HPC, whether delivered by clusters, the Cloud or any other means, as easy and intuitive as possible

“to make using high performance, parallel computing as easy as using a laptop”.

To deliver these objectives the Centre deliver an ongoing series of projects, each involving all the skills, knowledge and experience necessary to maximise the chances of successful delivery and maximum impact.

Facilities and Resources

• BlueGene/Q with 98,304 cores (>1.2 PF)• Over 5 PB disc (DDN/GPFS) and 15 PB tape stores• iDataplex cluster with 8192 Intel “Sandybridge” cores (>200 TF) • iDataplex/ScaleMP “Big Data” system (e.g. 8 X 4TB images)• 4 visualisation suites (e.g. Virtalis ActiveWall – 8 channel )• 54 seat training suite• 3 year collaboration with IBM Research

Applications development

and Optimisation User -software development “enCORE” HPC On-demand

from OCF ltd

Collaboration – multi-discipline projects Training and Education

Activities

Opportunities

• Computing is already ubiquitous – use of and access to High Performance Computing is not.

• Hartree Centre offers an opportunity to collaborate in the development of software for next generation hardware.

• “Software to accelerate research and innovation”

• Contact michael.gleaves@stfc.ac.uk or david.moss@stfc.ac.uk to discuss