Edinburgh DiRAC Resource Grant
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Edinburgh
Department Name: Sch of Physics and Astronomy
Abstract
DiRAC (Distributed Research utilising Advanced Computing) is the integrated supercomputing facility for theoretical modelling and HPC-based research in particle physics, nuclear physics, astronomy and cosmology, areas in which the UK is world-leading. It was funded as a result of investment of £12.32 million, from the Government's Large Facilities Capital Fund, together with investment from STFC and from universities. In 2012, the DiRAC facility was upgraded with a further £15 million capital investment from government (DiRAC-2).
The DiRAC facility provides a variety of computer architectures, matching machine architecture to the algorithm design and requirements of the research problems to be solved. The science facilitated includes: using supercomputers to enable scientists to calculate what theories of the early universe predict and to test them against observations of the present universe; undertaking lattice field theory calculations whose primary aim is to increase the predictive power of the Standard Model of elementary particle interactions through numerical simulation of Quantum Chromodynamics; carrying out state-of-the-art cosmological simulations, including the large-scale distribution of dark matter, the formation of dark matter haloes, the formation and evolution of galaxies and clusters, the physics of the intergalactic medium and the properties of the intracluster gas.
This grant is to support the continued operation of the DiRAC facilities until 2017 to ensure that the UK remains one of the world-leaders of theoretical modelling in particle physics, astronomy and cosmology.
The DiRAC facility provides a variety of computer architectures, matching machine architecture to the algorithm design and requirements of the research problems to be solved. The science facilitated includes: using supercomputers to enable scientists to calculate what theories of the early universe predict and to test them against observations of the present universe; undertaking lattice field theory calculations whose primary aim is to increase the predictive power of the Standard Model of elementary particle interactions through numerical simulation of Quantum Chromodynamics; carrying out state-of-the-art cosmological simulations, including the large-scale distribution of dark matter, the formation of dark matter haloes, the formation and evolution of galaxies and clusters, the physics of the intergalactic medium and the properties of the intracluster gas.
This grant is to support the continued operation of the DiRAC facilities until 2017 to ensure that the UK remains one of the world-leaders of theoretical modelling in particle physics, astronomy and cosmology.
Planned Impact
The high-performance computing applications supported by DiRAC typically involve new algorithms and implementations optimised for high energy efficiency which impose demands on computer architectures that the computing industry has found useful for hardware and system software design and testing.
DiRAC researchers have on-going collaborations with computing companies that maintain this strong connection between the scientific goals of the DiRAC Consortium and the development of new computing technologies that drive the commercial high-performance computing market, with economic benefits to the companies involved and more powerful computing capabilities available to other application areas including many that address socio-economic challenges.
DiRAC researchers have on-going collaborations with computing companies that maintain this strong connection between the scientific goals of the DiRAC Consortium and the development of new computing technologies that drive the commercial high-performance computing market, with economic benefits to the companies involved and more powerful computing capabilities available to other application areas including many that address socio-economic challenges.
People |
ORCID iD |
| Richard Kenway (Principal Investigator) | |
| Peter Boyle (Co-Investigator) |
Publications
Semenov M
(2021)
Rovibronic spectroscopy of PN from first principles.
in Physical chemistry chemical physics : PCCP
Sergeev D
(2020)
Atmospheric Convection Plays a Key Role in the Climate of Tidally Locked Terrestrial Exoplanets: Insights from High-resolution Simulations
in The Astrophysical Journal
Shanahan P
(2015)
SU(3) breaking in hyperon transition vector form factors
in Physical Review D
Shanahan P
(2015)
Charge symmetry violation in the electromagnetic form factors of the nucleon
in Physical Review D
Shanahan PE
(2015)
Determination of the strange nucleon form factors.
in Physical review letters
Shao S
(2021)
The twisted dark matter halo of the Milky Way
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Shao S
(2021)
The survival of globular clusters in a cuspy Fornax
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Sharma M
(2019)
The I?ea model of feedback-regulated galaxy formation
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Shingles L
(2020)
Monte Carlo radiative transfer for the nebular phase of Type Ia supernovae
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Shingles L
(2022)
Modelling the ionization state of Type Ia supernovae in the nebular phase
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Silva HO
(2021)
Dynamical Descalarization in Binary Black Hole Mergers.
in Physical review letters
Silva HO
(2021)
Dynamical Descalarization in Binary Black Hole Mergers.
in Physical review letters
Simpson C
(2020)
The milky way total mass profile as inferred from Gaia DR2
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Sirks E
(2022)
The effects of self-interacting dark matter on the stripping of galaxies that fall into clusters
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Skaf N
(2020)
ARES. II. Characterizing the Hot Jupiters WASP-127 b, WASP-79 b, and WASP-62b with the Hubble Space Telescope
in The Astronomical Journal
Skullerud J
(2022)
Hadrons at high temperature: An update from the FASTSUM collaboration
in EPJ Web of Conferences
Slyz A
(2020)
How to quench a dwarf galaxy: The impact of inhomogeneous reionization on dwarf galaxies and cosmic filaments
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Smith A
(2022)
A light-cone catalogue from the Millennium-XXL simulation: improved spatial interpolation and colour distributions for the DESI BGS
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Smith A
(2021)
Reducing the variance of redshift space distortion measurements from mock galaxy catalogues with different lines of sight
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Smith A
(2022)
Solving small-scale clustering problems in approximate light-cone mocks
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Smith G
(2020)
The distribution of dark matter and gas spanning 6 Mpc around the post-merger galaxy cluster MS 0451-03
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Smith R
(2020)
The Cloud Factory I: Generating resolved filamentary molecular clouds from galactic-scale forces
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Solar M
(2020)
Azimuthal variations of oxygen abundance profiles in star-forming regions of disc galaxies in EAGLE simulations
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Soler J
(2020)
The history of dynamics and stellar feedback revealed by the H I filamentary structure in the disk of the Milky Way
in Astronomy & Astrophysics
Soler J
(2022)
The Galactic dynamics revealed by the filamentary structure in atomic hydrogen emission
in Astronomy & Astrophysics
Somà V
(2021)
Moving away from singly-magic nuclei with Gorkov Green's function theory
in The European Physical Journal A
Sorini D
(2020)
simba: the average properties of the circumgalactic medium of 2 = z = 3 quasars are determined primarily by stellar feedback
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Sorini D
(2022)
How baryons affect haloes and large-scale structure: a unified picture from the Simba simulation
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Sormani M
(2020)
Simulations of the Milky Way's Central Molecular Zone - II. Star formation
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Soussana A
(2020)
The impact of AGN feedback on galaxy intrinsic alignments in the Horizon simulations
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Sperhake U
(2020)
Amplification of superkicks in black-hole binaries through orbital eccentricity
in Physical Review D
Spraggs M.
(2016)
Computing the muon anomalous magnetic moment using the hybrid method with physical quark masses
in Proceedings of Science
Spriggs T
(2022)
A comparison of spectral reconstruction methods applied to non-zero temperature NRQCD meson correlation functions
in EPJ Web of Conferences
Srinivasan S
(2021)
Cosmological gravity on all scales. Part II. Model independent modified gravity N-body simulations
in Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics
Srisawat C
(2020)
MEGA: Merger graphs of structure formation
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Stafford S
(2021)
Testing extensions to ?CDM on small scales with forthcoming cosmic shear surveys
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Stafford S
(2020)
Exploring extensions to the standard cosmological model and the impact of baryons on small scales
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Steele T
(2021)
Precise calibration of the one-loop bispectrum in the effective field theory of large scale structure
in Physical Review D
Stevenson P
(2022)
Mean-field simulations of Es-254 + Ca-48 heavy-ion reactions
in Frontiers in Physics
Stickle A
(2022)
Effects of Impact and Target Parameters on the Results of a Kinetic Impactor: Predictions for the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) Mission
in The Planetary Science Journal
Stiskalek R
(2022)
The scatter in the galaxy-halo connection: a machine learning analysis
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Suarez T
(2021)
Modelling intergalactic low ionization metal absorption line systems near the epoch of reionization
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Sykes C
(2020)
Determining the primordial helium abundance and UV background using fluorescent emission in star-free dark matter haloes
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Talbot R
(2021)
Blandford-Znajek jets in galaxy formation simulations: method and implementation
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Theuns T
(2021)
Connecting cosmological accretion to strong Ly a absorbers
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Thomas N
(2021)
The radio galaxy population in the simba simulations
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Thomas N
(2022)
The environments of the radio galaxy population in simba
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Threlfall J
(2021)
Can Multi-threaded Flux Tubes in Coronal Arcades Support a Magnetohydrodynamic Avalanche?
in Solar physics
Threlfall J
(2020)
How Is Helicity (and Twist) Partitioned in Magnetohydrodynamic Simulations of Reconnecting Magnetic Flux Tubes?
in The Astrophysical Journal
Tinoco-Arenas A
(2022)
Parametric Study of Magnetosheath Jets in 2D Local Hybrid Simulations
in Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences
| Description | In December 2009, the STFC Facility, DiRAC, was established to provide distributed High Performance Computing (HPC) services for theoretical modelling and HPC-based research in particle physics, astronomy and cosmology. DiRAC provides a variety of computer architectures, matching machine architecture to the algorithm design and requirements of the research problems to be solved. This grant funds the continued operation of the 1.3Pflop/s Blue Gene/Q system at the University of Edinburgh, which was co-developed by Peter Boyle (University of Edinburgh) and IBM to run with high energy efficiency for months at a time on a single problem to solve some of the most complex problems in physics, particularly the strong interactions of quarks and gluons. The DiRAC Facility supports over 250 active researchers at 27 UK HEIs. This includes the research projects of 100 funded research staff (PDRAs and Research Fellows), over 50 post-graduate projects, and £1.6M of funded research grants. |
| Exploitation Route | Theoretical results obtained input to a range of experimental programmes aiming to increase our understanding of Nature. Algorithms and software developed provide input to computer design. |
| Sectors | Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software) |
| URL | http://dirac.ac.uk/ |
| Description | Intel IPAG QCD codesign project |
| Organisation | Intel Corporation |
| Department | Intel Corporation (Jones Farm) |
| Country | United States |
| Sector | Private |
| PI Contribution | We have collaborated with Intel corporation since 2014 with $720k of total direct funding, starting initially as an Intel parallel computing centre, and expanding to direct close collaboration with Intel Pathfinding and Architecture Group. |
| Collaborator Contribution | We have performed detailed optimisation of QCD codes (Wilson, Domain Wall, Staggered) on Intel many core architectures. We have investigated the memory system and interconnect performance, particularly on Intel's latest interconnect hardware called Omnipath. We found serious performance issues and worked with Intel to plan a solution and this has been verified and is available as beta software. It will reach general availability in the Intel MPI 2019 release, and allow threaded concurrent communications in MPI for the first time. A joint paper on the resolution to this was written with the Intel MPI team, and the application of the same QCD programming techniques to machine learning gradient reduction was applied in the paper to the Baidu Research all reduce library, demonstrating a 10x gain for this critical step in machine learning in clustered environments. We are also working with Intel verifying future architectures that will deliver the exascale performance in 2021. |
| Impact | We have performed detailed optimisation of QCD codes (Wilson, Domain Wall, Staggered) on Intel many core architectures. We have investigated the memory system and interconnect performance, particularly on Intel's latest interconnect hardware called Omnipath. We found serious performance issues and worked with Intel to plan a solution and this has been verified and is available as beta software. It will reach general availability in the Intel MPI 2019 release, and allow threaded concurrent communications in MPI for the first time. A joint paper on the resolution to this was written with the Intel MPI team, and the application of the same QCD programming techniques to machine learning gradient reduction was applied in the paper to the Baidu Research all reduce library, demonstrating a 10x gain for this critical step in machine learning in clustered environments. This collaboration has been renewed annually in 2018, 2019, 2020. Two DiRAC RSE's were hired by Intel to work on the Turing collaboration. |
| Start Year | 2016 |