EPCC News 91

From our Director

Over the past decade EPCC has grown into an organisation which extends well beyond our initial focus on parallel computing. More and more our work is spanning the domains of computational science and data science, and this is also in evidence in the infrastructure we provide. A key computational science milestone was reached in January 2022 when ARCHER2 opened for general use. Delivering a sustained 19.5 Petaflop/s on the HPL benchmark and placing it 22nd in the TOP500 supercomputers in the world, the system has been an immediate success with very heavy user demand. Clearly justifying the need for more investment in supercomputing in the UK.

In parallel, we’ve continued to grow our data science infrastructure through the Edinburgh International Data Facility investment. Earlier this year we reached a key milestone when we completed the end-to-end EIDF service roll-out for our main Data Science Cloud. This is now being enhanced with a full upgrade of our Safe Havens environment and the rollout of a rich set of AI-focussed systems including an NVIDIA A100 cluster and Cerebras CS-1 – which will soon also include a Graphcore Pod64 system using the Bristol-based company’s world-leading Bow IPU. Having a wide variety of systems allows the academic, public and private sector users we support to explore the most applicable system for their work.

There are a wide variety of articles in this issue of our newsletter which show how we, and the users we support, are using these infrastructures to great effect. I hope you enjoy this issue of EPCC News and please do get in touch with any feedback.

Mark Parsons

EPCC Director

m.parsons@epcc.ed.ac.uk