The Project Team

The business case, project management and eventual service management are being carried out by the IT Service. This work has taken place in close consultation with the university’s research communities, via the HPC Steering group, and via a series of open consultation events that took place in Summer 2016.

The Project’s Main Deliverables are: 

• The Purchase of High Performance Computing equipment, both hardware and software
• Appointment to two new posts (Research Computing Specialist, HPC System Administrator)
• Establishment of a University-wide HPC service, designed to fully realise the potential benefits of the above investments

Why?

to quote the initial business case:

” High performance computing is the practice of aggregating very large numbers of computers (often many thousands) to deliver much higher performance than one could get out of a typical desktop computer or workstation.  This is done to solve large problems in science, engineering, medicine, and, increasingly in the social sciences and humanities.

The effective use of HPC systems can reduce the solution time of really big computing problems from months or years to hours or days.

HPC is often used for modelling and solving highly complex research problems, and a lot of research that would have been carried out in the past using laboratory experiments is now carried out computationally, using models run on HPC.

Moreover, the power and complexity of HPC applications and technology have given rise to the multi-disciplinary field of expertise in their use: Computational Science, establishing itself as the “third pillar” of scientific enquiry, alongside theory and experiment. “

We believe that the best way to provide and manage such a resource at the institutional level is via a centrally-delivered service, free at point-of-use to all university researchers, backed up by specialist support and training.

When?

Requirements-gathering took place during early Summer 2016, to be followed by recruitment, procurement and installation during late 2016 and early 2017.

Service launch is slated for May-July 2017