The UK’s National HPC Competence Centre

EuroCC@UK is run by EPCC in collaboration with STFC’s Hartree Centre, with both centres utilising complementary expertise to deliver on the goals of EuroCC and the UK’s NCC. Now in its second year, the collaboration’s two UK partners have focused their efforts on a range of areas including training, industry engagement, facilitating scientific and technical expertise transfer, and competence mapping.

Accessible training

EPCC has taken a lead in investigating innovative training methodologies and accessibility. We carried out a survey of existing training courses and identified topics to be used in an exemplar of accessible training. This has led to the development of an online self-study course (similar to the successful MOOC format) designed to make the course as accessible as possible. The course builds on the web-based delivery format developed by the Carpentries, which has been designed to be accessible and configurable.

Technology transfer

UK technology transfer is our second area of focus, and we have been working to ensure the correct mechanisms are in place to support it. For example, we have initiated an awareness campaign aligned with our normal commercial outreach activities to promote the NCC to UK industry. Under EuroCC we have been assisting companies to prepare bids for further funding by providing technical and business expertise to ensure high-quality proposals.

Pilot studies

EPCC has initiated a pilot study under the UK NCC and supported by the Scottish Funding Council which is investigating novel machine learning techniques applied to recycling packaging materials. A second pilot study developed under the UK NCC has been confirmed and we have a pipeline of interested companies with which we are discussing future pilot studies.

Technology reports

We are carrying out technology state-of-the-art investigations, each of which produce a report on a topic of interest to HPC application developers. We have recently initiated two of these investigations.

The first of these will assess the suitability of the Rust programming language for HPC applications. Rust is a relatively new language: like C++ it is object-orientated, but has in-built features that help enforce memory and thread safety. We will be investigating the performance of Rust compared to traditional HPC languages, its portability across CPU architectures, its suitability for both shared memory and distributed memory parallelism, and its ability to integrate with scientific libraries and with batch systems.

The other investigation is focussed on task-aware communication libraries. Programming using tasks with data dependencies is a powerful method for minimising idle time due to excessive synchronisation and load imbalance in parallel applications, and is supported by APIs such as OpenMP and OmpSs. Implementing a full tasking model efficiently on distributed memory is very challenging, so a practical compromise is to use a hybrid of tasks within a node and traditional communication library such as MPI or GASPI between nodes.

Hartree Centre activities

The work described in the three focus areas above is complemented by our partners at the Hartree Centre who, amongst other activities, are working to create a supportive environment in which organisations can explore the latest digital technologies and skills, developing proofs-of-concept and applying them to industry and public sector challenges. They have also taken the lead in exploring different ways of engaging industry in training activities, holding a series of Design Thinking Workshops with the involvement of teaching staff and customers.

www.eurocc-access.eu

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