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
Lovell C
(2021)
First Light And Reionization Epoch Simulations (FLARES) - I. Environmental dependence of high-redshift galaxy evolution
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Changeat Q
(2022)
Five Key Exoplanet Questions Answered via the Analysis of 25 Hot-Jupiter Atmospheres in Eclipse
in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series
Desmond H
(2021)
Five percent measurement of the gravitational constant in the Large Magellanic Cloud
in Physical Review D
Bornyakov V
(2017)
Flavour breaking effects in the pseudoscalar meson decay constants
in Physics Letters B
Quinn J
(2022)
Flute and kink instabilities in a dynamically twisted flux tube with anisotropic plasma viscosity
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Nealon R
(2019)
Flyby-induced misalignments in planet-hosting discs
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Clarke C
(2020)
Forbidden line diagnostics of photoevaporative disc winds
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Arnold C
(2022)
forge : the f ( R )-gravity cosmic emulator project - I. Introduction and matter power spectrum emulator
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Cooper L
(2022)
Form factors for the processes B c + ? D 0 l + ? l and B c + ? D s + l + l - ( ? ? ¯ ) from lattice QCD
in Physical Review D
Fyfe L
(2021)
Forward modelling of heating within a coronal arcade
in Astronomy & Astrophysics
Alioli S
(2021)
Four-lepton production in gluon fusion at NLO matched to parton showers
in The European Physical Journal C
Prole L
(2022)
Fragmentation-induced starvation in Population III star formation: a resolution study
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Prole L
(2023)
From dark matter halos to pre-stellar cores: high resolution follow-up of cosmological Lyman-Werner simulations
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Jones C
(2021)
Fully developed anelastic convection with no-slip boundaries
in Journal of Fluid Mechanics
Mitchell P
(2020)
Galactic inflow and wind recycling rates in the eagle simulations
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Mitchell P
(2020)
Galactic outflow rates in the EAGLE simulations
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Forouhar Moreno V
(2022)
Galactic satellite systems in CDM, WDM and SIDM
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Borukhovetskaya A
(2022)
Galactic tides and the Crater II dwarf spheroidal: a challenge to LCDM?
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Davé R
(2020)
Galaxy cold gas contents in modern cosmological hydrodynamic simulations
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Hernández-Aguayo C
(2021)
Galaxy formation in the brane world I: overview and first results
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
McAlpine S
(2020)
Galaxy mergers in eagle do not induce a significant amount of black hole growth yet do increase the rate of luminous AGN
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Xu W
(2020)
Galaxy properties in the cosmic web of EAGLE simulation
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
He Q
(2022)
Galaxy-galaxy strong lens perturbations: line-of-sight haloes versus lens subhaloes
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Nelson R
(2023)
Gas accretion onto Jupiter mass planets in discs with laminar accretion flows
in Astronomy & Astrophysics
Hannaford-Gunn A
(2022)
Generalized parton distributions from the off-forward Compton amplitude in lattice QCD
in Physical Review D
Currie L
(2020)
Generation of shear flows and vortices in rotating anelastic convection
in Physical Review Fluids
Beraldo e Silva L
(2020)
Geometric properties of galactic discs with clumpy episodes
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Clough K
(2022)
Ghost Instabilities in Self-Interacting Vector Fields: The Problem with Proca Fields.
in Physical review letters
Bennett E
(2021)
Glueballs and strings in S p ( 2 N ) Yang-Mills theories
in Physical Review D
Barrera-Hinojosa C
(2020)
GRAMSES: a new route to general relativistic N -body simulations in cosmology. Part I. Methodology and code description
in Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics
Barrera-Hinojosa C
(2020)
GRAMSES: a new route to general relativistic N -body simulations in cosmology. Part II. Initial conditions
in Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics
Figueras P
(2020)
Gravitational collapse in cubic Horndeski theories
in Classical and Quantum Gravity
Andrade T
(2021)
GRChombo: An adaptable numerical relativity code for fundamental physics
in Journal of Open Source Software
Boyle P
(2015)
Grid: A next generation data parallel C++ QCD library
Boyle P
(2016)
Grid: A next generation data parallel C++ QCD library
Bamber J
(2021)
Growth of accretion driven scalar hair around Kerr black holes
in Physical Review D
Amato A
(2015)
Hadron wave functions as a probe of a two-color baryonic medium
in The European Physical Journal A
Davies C
(2020)
Hadronic-vacuum-polarization contribution to the muon's anomalous magnetic moment from four-flavor lattice QCD
in Physical Review D
Skullerud J
(2022)
Hadrons at high temperature: An update from the FASTSUM collaboration
in EPJ Web of Conferences
Amorisco N
(2022)
Halo concentration strengthens dark matter constraints in galaxy-galaxy strong lensing analyses
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Gómez J
(2022)
Halo merger tree comparison: impact on galaxy formation models
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Ballabio G
(2021)
HD 143006: circumbinary planet or misaligned disc?
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Boyle P
(2018)
Heavy Domain Wall Fermions: The RBC and UKQCD charm physics program
in EPJ Web of Conferences
Yamaguchi A
(2016)
Hierarchically deflated conjugate residual
Camps P
(2022)
High-resolution synthetic UV-submm images for Milky Way-mass simulated galaxies from the ARTEMIS project
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Elbers W
(2022)
Higher order initial conditions with massive neutrinos
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
Salcido J
(2020)
How feedback shapes galaxies: an analytic model
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
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 |