EPCC News 93
May 2023
UK Exascale comes a big step closer
From our Deputy Director
Welcome to the summer 2023 issue of EPCC News. This is my first as Deputy Director and I want to express my enthusiasm for the diversity and distinctiveness of the work being done right now at EPCC. I’ve come here from the Data-Driven Innovation initiative and have worked with EPCC in that context for a number of years.
These are exciting times. In its 2023 Spring Budget the UK Government committed to delivering a key recommendation of the Future of Compute Review, to invest to build an Exascale supercomputer. This is a major milestone, but it is just a milestone, and there is a significant journey ahead to convert it into reality.
This issue of EPCC News illustrates the diversity of EPCC’s activities, from the opportunities coming in the (near) future - from the UK Government’s Future of Compute Review through the ExCALIBUR projects and quantum computing, to what we are doing right now - with an overview of what it means to host and operate the ARCHER2 service, and updates from the Software Sustainability Institute. There is a lot of ground covered.
Further highlights include our PhD student placements and their experiences at EPCC, celebration of our EPCC MSc students as they prepare to compete in the Student Cluster Competition at ISC High Performance 2023 in May, and a spotlight on two projects: the first in support of the ‘Peace and Conflict Resolution Evidence Platform’, creating an online platform for global peace process data analytics; the second supporting children with autism, utilising ML-based facial emotion recognition to provide real-time support, working on improving the accuracy of the detection.
I hope you enjoy this issue and, as ever, feedback is always welcome.
Ritchie Somerville,
EPCC Deputy Director