DiRAC-2: Recurrent Costs for Complexity@DiRAC Cluster at University of Leicester

Lead Research Organisation: University of Leicester
Department Name: Physics and Astronomy

Abstract

This award is for the recurrent costs of Complexity@DiRAC cluster at the the University of Leicester. It will cover electricity costs, support staff costs of the cluster which is part of the DiRAC-2 national facility.

Planned Impact

The pathways to impact for the project are as agreed at the DiRAC PMB meeting on 21 November 2011 and subsequently reported on in the annual reports of the facility.

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.

Boyle (University of Edinburgh) co-designed the Blue-Gene/Q compute chip with IBM. This is now deployed in 1.3 Pflop/s systems at Edinburgh and Daresbury and 15 other sites in the world, including the world's largest system at Lawrence Livermore Labs. This is the greenest HPC architecture in the world and offers a route to cheap affordable petascale and exascale computing that will have profound effects on Energy, Health, Environment and Security sectors.

Boyle and IBM have 4 US patents pending resulting from the Blue Gene/Q chip set design project with IBM. Boyle was a co-author of IBM's Gauss Award winning paper at the International Supercomputing conference and has co-authored IEEE and IBM Journal papers on the Blue Gene/Q architecture with IBM.

Falle (Leeds University) partially developed the MG code on DiRAC. This has been used in the National Grid COOLTRANS project to model dispersion of CO2 from high pressure pipelines carrying CO2 for carbon sequestration.

At UCL, a virtual quantum laboratory suite has been created by the UCL spinout firm, QUANTEMOL. It has application in industry, energy, health and environmental monitoring.

Calleja (Cambridge University) is using DiRAC to work with Xyratex, the UK's leading disk manufacturer, to develop the fastest storage arrays in the world.

The COSMOS consortium (Shellard) has had a long-standing collaboration with SGI (since 1997) and with Intel (since 2003) which has allowed access to leading-edge shared-memory technologies, inlcuding the world's first UV2000 in 2012, which was also the first SMP system enabled with Intel Phi (KnightsCorner) processors. Adaptive Computing are using the COSMOS@DiRAC platform to develop a single-image version of their MOAB HPC Suite.

Publications

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Griffin A (2020) AGNs at the cosmic dawn: predictions for future surveys from a ?CDM cosmological model in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

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Griffin A (2019) The evolution of SMBH spin and AGN luminosities for z < 6 within a semi-analytic model of galaxy formation in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

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Grisdale K (2019) On the observed diversity of star formation efficiencies in Giant Molecular Clouds in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

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Gu Q (2022) The spatial distribution of satellites in galaxy clusters in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

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Gualandris A (2017) Collisionless loss-cone refilling: there is no final parsec problem in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

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Gupta P (2022) A study of global magnetic helicity in self-consistent spherical dynamos in Geophysical & Astrophysical Fluid Dynamics

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Gurung-López S (2019) Lya emitters in a cosmological volume II: the impact of the intergalactic medium in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

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Gurung-López S (2019) Lya emitters in a cosmological volume - I. The impact of radiative transfer in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

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Gómez J (2022) Halo merger tree comparison: impact on galaxy formation models in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

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Gülpers V. (2018) Isospin breaking corrections to the HVP at the physical point in Proceedings of Science

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Habouzit M (2021) Supermassive black holes in cosmological simulations I: M BH - M ? relation and black hole mass function in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

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Hague P (2014) Dark matter in disc galaxies - II. Density profiles as constraints on feedback scenarios in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

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Hague P (2015) THE DEGENERACY OF M33 MASS MODELING AND ITS PHYSICAL IMPLICATIONS in The Astrophysical Journal

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Haidar H (2022) The black hole population in low-mass galaxies in large-scale cosmological simulations in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

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Hall C (2016) Directly observing continuum emission from self-gravitating spiral waves in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

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Hands T (2014) Understanding the assembly of Kepler's compact planetary systems in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

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Hands T (2016) There might be giants: unseen Jupiter-mass planets as sculptors of tightly packed planetary systems in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

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Hands T (2018) Breaking mean-motion resonances during Type I planet migration in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

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Harries T (2019) The TORUS radiation transfer code in Astronomy and Computing

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Hassan S (2020) Testing galaxy formation simulations with damped Lyman-a abundance and metallicity evolution in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

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Haworth T (2020) The observational anatomy of externally photoevaporating planet-forming discs - I. Atomic carbon in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

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Haworth T (2021) Warm millimetre dust in protoplanetary discs near massive stars in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

 
Description Many new discoveries about the formation and evolution of galaxies, star formation, planet formation have been made possible by the award.
Exploitation Route Many international collaborative projects are supported by the HPC resources provided by DiRAC.
Sectors Aerospace, Defence and Marine,Creative Economy,Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software),Education,Manufacturing, including Industrial Biotechology,Retail,Other

URL http://www.dirac.ac.uk
 
Description Significant co-design project with Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, including partnership in the HPE/Arm/Suse Catalyst UK programme.
First Year Of Impact 2017
Sector Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software)
Impact Types Societal

 
Description DiRAC 2.5x Project Office 2017-2020
Amount £300,000 (GBP)
Organisation Science and Technologies Facilities Council (STFC) 
Sector Public
Country United Kingdom
Start 02/2018 
End 03/2020
 
Title Citation analysys and Impact 
Description Use of IT to determineacademic impact of eInfrastructure 
Type Of Material Improvements to research infrastructure 
Year Produced 2017 
Provided To Others? Yes  
Impact Understood emerging trends in DiRAC Science and helped decide the scale and type of IT investments and direct us to develop new technologies 
URL http://www.dirac.ac.uk
 
Description Co-design project with Hewlett Packard Enterprise 
Organisation Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)
Country United Kingdom 
Sector Private 
PI Contribution Technical support and operations costs for running the hardware. Research workflows to test the system performance, and investment of academic time and software engineering time to optimise code for new hardware. Project will explore suitability of hardware for DiRAC workflows and provide feedback to HPE.
Collaborator Contribution In-kind provision of research computing hardware. Value is commercially confidential.
Impact As this collaboration is about to commence, there are no outcomes to report at this point.
Start Year 2018
 
Description Nuclei from Lattice QCD 
Organisation RIKEN
Department RIKEN-Nishina Center for Accelerator-Based Science
Country Japan 
Sector Public 
PI Contribution Surrey performed ab initio studies of LQCD-derived nuclear forces
Collaborator Contribution Work by Prof. Hatsuda and collaborators at the iTHEMS and Quantum Hadron Physics Laboratory to provide nuclear forces derived from LQCD
Impact Phys. Rev. C 97, 021303(R)
Start Year 2015
 
Description STFC Centres for Doctoral Training in Data Intensive Science 
Organisation University of Leicester
Department STFC DiRAC Complexity Cluster (HPC Facility Leicester)
Country United Kingdom 
Sector Academic/University 
PI Contribution Support for STFC Centres for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Data Intensive Science - DiRAC is a partner in five of the eight of the newly established STFC CDTs, and is actively engaged with them in developing industrial partnerships. DiRAC is also offering placements to CDT students interested in Research Software Engineering roles.
Collaborator Contribution Students to work on interesting technical problems for DiRAC
Impact This is the first year
Start Year 2017