MidPlus: A Centre of Excellence for Computational Science, Engineering and Mathematics
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Warwick
Department Name: Centre for Scientific Computing
Abstract
We propose to establish a Centre of Excellence for Computational Science, Engineering and Mathematics (MidPlus) that serves the M1/M6 corridor from London to the Midlands, initially based on four leading universities with outstanding credentials for cross-institutional collaboration, industrial partnership, and computational research: Warwick, Birmingham, Nottingham and Queen Mary. We focus on this region because geographical proximity greatly facilitates outreach and ongoing interactions with industrial partners-especially for SMEs. MidPlus is well located to serve many organisations within the UK's automotive, aerospace, biomedical, materials and creative industries. We will extend this partnership to such companies, and other Universities, as MidPlus develops.
This Centre of Excellence will be established with an initial investment in e-Infrastructure of £3M (£1.6M from this EPSRC call and £1.4M from the partner Universities) that will provide:
* High performance Computing (HPC) through a capability cluster (Warwick; 2700 cores, infiniBand, some GPU and large-memory SMP nodes) to be combined with Warwick's existing cluster (commissioned 05/2011) to create a 6000 core cluster and so maximise scope for large massively parallel jobs; and a high throughput cluster (QMUL, 2900 cores) to facilitate projects that require multiple runs to span large parameter spaces.
* Data storage and archive facilities (mirrored at Birmingham and Nottingham for data integrity) to enable mid- and long-term storage of research data (initially ~1 PB capacity), and the management structures to enable metadata-based search and retrieval with secure implementation of a range of user-specified levels of privacy.
In the longer term we will: extend the capacity of the data store; develop an automated data-aging protocol to migrate data, successively, to appropriate longer-term storage technologies; extend the range of tier-2 HPC architecture we support; and develop greater integration of, and faster regional network connections between, the data and compute hardware.
Our collective research expertise and mastery of managing and using e-Infrastructure is as crucial to the success of MidPlus as is the equipment we will install. We will therefore build an intellectual superstructure on top of the e-Infrastructure that will:
* actively promote collaborations that cross disciplinary and institutional boundaries;
* provide a coordinated systems and administrative support team to enable industries with existing expertise to use these facilities-either to deal with the peaks in their internal demand for computer facilities or as an alternative to establishing their own;
* provide an expertise-base to nurture new industrial use of this e-Infrastructure;
* create a strategic framework within which to sustain and develop the regional e-Infrastructure.
This intellectual superstructure will enable MidPlus to offer services that add much more value than could be obtained from the bare e-Infrastructure or, indeed, from industrial cloud computing services.
This Centre of Excellence will be established with an initial investment in e-Infrastructure of £3M (£1.6M from this EPSRC call and £1.4M from the partner Universities) that will provide:
* High performance Computing (HPC) through a capability cluster (Warwick; 2700 cores, infiniBand, some GPU and large-memory SMP nodes) to be combined with Warwick's existing cluster (commissioned 05/2011) to create a 6000 core cluster and so maximise scope for large massively parallel jobs; and a high throughput cluster (QMUL, 2900 cores) to facilitate projects that require multiple runs to span large parameter spaces.
* Data storage and archive facilities (mirrored at Birmingham and Nottingham for data integrity) to enable mid- and long-term storage of research data (initially ~1 PB capacity), and the management structures to enable metadata-based search and retrieval with secure implementation of a range of user-specified levels of privacy.
In the longer term we will: extend the capacity of the data store; develop an automated data-aging protocol to migrate data, successively, to appropriate longer-term storage technologies; extend the range of tier-2 HPC architecture we support; and develop greater integration of, and faster regional network connections between, the data and compute hardware.
Our collective research expertise and mastery of managing and using e-Infrastructure is as crucial to the success of MidPlus as is the equipment we will install. We will therefore build an intellectual superstructure on top of the e-Infrastructure that will:
* actively promote collaborations that cross disciplinary and institutional boundaries;
* provide a coordinated systems and administrative support team to enable industries with existing expertise to use these facilities-either to deal with the peaks in their internal demand for computer facilities or as an alternative to establishing their own;
* provide an expertise-base to nurture new industrial use of this e-Infrastructure;
* create a strategic framework within which to sustain and develop the regional e-Infrastructure.
This intellectual superstructure will enable MidPlus to offer services that add much more value than could be obtained from the bare e-Infrastructure or, indeed, from industrial cloud computing services.
Planned Impact
The impact of the MidPlus project could be truly far-reaching, especially for small to medium sized enterprises within the our region. In MidPlus, we are proposing to establish a high-quality tier-2 e-infrastructure, with both high performance computing (HPC) and data facilities, that will serve all enterprises within the MidPlus region; this region is based around the M1/M6 corridor from London to the Midlands, and contains commercial strength in the UK's automotive, aerospace, biomedical, materials and creative industries. Most importantly, we plan to enhance the value of the facility-provision considerably by building a powerful consultancy and training framework around the strategic collaboration that is at the heart of MidPlus. This will enable commercial and industrial enterprises to recognise how they can benefit from state-of-the-art e-Infrastructure, and then develop the consultancies and internal skill-sets to reap maximum commercial advantage from using it.
To ensure we deliver full impact in the region, we will undertake a number of activities to ensure effective engagement with stakeholders in the region. These will include workshops, designed either to communicate our research expertise across disciplinary and cultural boundaries, or to brainstorm on current problems that are challenging some of the enterprises. We will also appoint business engagement officers to identify, and then nurture potential partnerships with SMEs and established industries. Activity in this area will be considerably enhanced by developing commercial partnerships with value-added companies such as OCF plc, where this is appropriate.
We will also work closely with a number of successful industry-linkage programmes our Universities are already involved in, notably the Warwick Manufacturing Group, the Horizon Digital Economy research hub and ImpactQM. These will be excellent vehicles for raising awareness of MidPlus as a precursor to identifying and evaluating benefits and then moving to engagement.
To ensure we deliver full impact in the region, we will undertake a number of activities to ensure effective engagement with stakeholders in the region. These will include workshops, designed either to communicate our research expertise across disciplinary and cultural boundaries, or to brainstorm on current problems that are challenging some of the enterprises. We will also appoint business engagement officers to identify, and then nurture potential partnerships with SMEs and established industries. Activity in this area will be considerably enhanced by developing commercial partnerships with value-added companies such as OCF plc, where this is appropriate.
We will also work closely with a number of successful industry-linkage programmes our Universities are already involved in, notably the Warwick Manufacturing Group, the Horizon Digital Economy research hub and ImpactQM. These will be excellent vehicles for raising awareness of MidPlus as a precursor to identifying and evaluating benefits and then moving to engagement.
Organisations
Publications
Hey JC
(2016)
Isomers and Energy Landscapes of Perchlorate-Water Clusters and a Comparison to Pure Water and Sulfate-Water Clusters.
in The journal of physical chemistry. A
Tian K
(2016)
Periodic vs. molecular cluster approaches to resolving glass structure and properties: Anorthite a case study
in Journal of Non-Crystalline Solids
Von Wyschetzki K
(2016)
Transcriptomic response to injury sheds light on the physiological costs of reproduction in ant queens.
in Molecular ecology
Battiston F
(2016)
Interplay between consensus and coherence in a model of interacting opinions
in Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena
Gaines E
(2016)
The role of solvent in the self-assembly of m-aminobenzoic acid: a density functional theory and molecular dynamics study
in CrystEngComm
Lyra W
(2017)
Orbital Advection with Magnetohydrodynamics and Vector Potential
in The Astronomical Journal
Smeets PJM
(2017)
A classical view on nonclassical nucleation.
in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Mondragon R
(2017)
Multilink Communities of Multiplex Networks
Trinchera P
(2017)
Intermolecular Aryne Ene Reaction of Hantzsch Esters: Stable Covalent Ene Adducts from a 1,4-Dihydropyridine Reaction.
in Organic letters
Savojardo A
(2017)
Dispersion map induced energy transfer between solitons in optical fibres
Freedman RB
(2017)
'Something in the way she moves': The functional significance of flexibility in the multiple roles of protein disulfide isomerase (PDI).
in Biochimica et biophysica acta. Proteins and proteomics
Mutter M
(2017)
The role of disc self-gravity in circumbinary planet systems - II. Planet evolution
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Martinez P
(2017)
Quantification of within-sample genetic heterogeneity from SNP-array data.
in Scientific reports
Yang C
(2017)
Emergence and Evolution of the k Gap in Spectra of Liquid and Supercritical States.
in Physical review letters
Botta F
(2017)
Analysis of the communities of an urban mobile phone network.
in PloS one
Beake EO
(2017)
Orientational Disorder in Adamantane and Adamantanecarboxylic Acid.
in Chemphyschem : a European journal of chemical physics and physical chemistry
Afolabi D
(2017)
Positive impact of cladribine on quality of life in people with relapsing multiple sclerosis
in Multiple Sclerosis Journal
Coleman G
(2017)
In situ accretion of gaseous envelopes on to planetary cores embedded in evolving protoplanetary discs
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Sarma G
(2017)
Collision energy dependence of state-to-state differential cross sections for rotationally inelastic scattering of H2O by He.
in Physical chemistry chemical physics : PCCP
Guardiani C
(2017)
On the selectivity of the NaChBac channel: an integrated computational and experimental analysis of sodium and calcium permeation
in Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics
Baker D
(2017)
Both cladribine and alemtuzumab may effect MS via B-cell depletion
in Neurology Neuroimmunology & Neuroinflammation
Prakash M
(2017)
Anisotropic diffusion of water molecules in hydroxyapatite nanopores
in Physics and Chemistry of Minerals
Mutter M
(2017)
The role of disc self-gravity in circumbinary planet systems - I. Disc structure and evolution
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
McNally C
(2017)
Low mass planet migration in magnetically torqued dead zones - I. Static migration torque
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Zhang R
(2017)
Screening for Cu-S based thermoelectric materials using crystal structure features
in Journal of Materials Chemistry A
Seresinhe CI
(2017)
Using deep learning to quantify the beauty of outdoor places.
in Royal Society open science
Gillman M
(2017)
GENESIS - The GENEric SImulation System for Modelling State Transitions
in Journal of Open Research Software
Duncan H
(2017)
Local structure of a switchable dielectric Prussian blue analogue
in CrystEngComm
Hückelheim J
(2017)
Algorithmic Differentiation of Code with Multiple Context-Specific Activities
in ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software
Pöppler A
(2017)
Single-crystal X-ray diffraction and NMR crystallography of a 1:1 cocrystal of dithianon and pyrimethanil
in Acta Crystallographica Section C Structural Chemistry
Dellis D
(2017)
An investigation of thermodynamics, microscopic structure, depolarized Rayleigh scattering, and collision dynamics in Xe-N 2 supercritical mixtures
in Journal of Molecular Liquids
Zubiaga A
(2017)
Towards Real-Time, Country-Level Location Classification of Worldwide Tweets
in IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering
Wang L
(2017)
Supercritical Grüneisen parameter and its universality at the Frenkel line.
in Physical review. E
Shaw D
(2017)
Examining the role of protein structural dynamics in drug resistance in Mycobacterium tuberculosis
in Chemical Science
Suess CJ
(2017)
Quantum chemical calculations of tryptophan ? heme electron and excitation energy transfer rates in myoglobin.
in Journal of computational chemistry
Chanuki Illushka Seresinhe
(2017)
Supplementary Material from Using deep learning to quantify the beauty of outdoor places
Smeeton L
(2017)
Investigation of the Structures and Energy Landscapes of Thiocyanate-Water Clusters
in Inorganics
Pracana R
(2017)
Fire ant social chromosomes: Differences in number, sequence and expression of odorant binding proteins.
in Evolution letters
Sollars ES
(2017)
Genome sequence and genetic diversity of European ash trees.
in Nature
Gao M
(2017)
Molecular dynamics study of CO 2 absorption and desorption in zinc imidazolate frameworks
in Molecular Systems Design & Engineering
Oswald J
(2017)
Manifestation of many-body interactions in the integer quantum Hall effect regime
in Physical Review B
Wang L
(2017)
Direct links between dynamical, thermodynamic, and structural properties of liquids: Modeling results.
in Physical review. E
Eberhard M
(2017)
Rogue wave generation by inelastic quasi-soliton collisions in optical fibres
in Optics Express
Description | This grant was to establish a regional high-end e-Infrastructure centre (MidPlus), serving the Universities of Birmingham, Warwick, Nottingham and QMUL, and looking to develop links with other Universities and industry in the London/Midlands region. We have established a range of facilities, including High Performance and High Throughput Clusters and a (mirrored) PB data store that has now been fully used and servicing this community for three years. |
Exploitation Route | This grant provided a service, and this service is being used by many researchers in Universities and industry to tackle their specific R&D problems. |
Sectors | Aerospace, Defence and Marine,Agriculture, Food and Drink,Chemicals,Creative Economy,Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software),Education,Energy,Environment,Healthcare,Manufacturing, including Industrial Biotechology,Pharmaceuticals and Medical Biotechnology |
URL | http://www.midplus.ac.uk |
Description | This service has prompted concerted effort between the four member Universities to develop ways to interact cooperatively with Industry in the area of Scientific Computing and e-Infrastructure exploitation. This is an ongoing development. the establishment of the Centre has also led to the formation of a network with four other EPSRC-funded Regional Centres, associated with EPSRC grant EP/M02010X/1 |
First Year Of Impact | 2011 |
Sector | Aerospace, Defence and Marine,Agriculture, Food and Drink,Chemicals,Creative Economy,Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software),Education,Energy,Environment,Healthcare,Pharmaceuticals and Medical Biotechnology |
Impact Types | Societal,Economic |