MSc in High Performance Computing

Over the last two decades the use of powerful computers and networks in science has become very important. Many new and exciting research areas have opened up, for example in physics, chemistry, engineering and biology. Taken together, the use of supercomputers, networking and large databases to solve scientific problems is known as High End Computing (HEC).EPCC is an institute within the School of Physics at the University of Edinburgh. We have around 60 full-time staff, and our aim is to help academic researchers and commercial companies to exploit HEC. To create the Training Centre we have enhanced and extended our established MSc programme with some help from our colleagues at Daresbury Laboratory.The EPCC High End Computing Training Centre is designed to provide one year of postgraduate training at masters level. The students who come to the Centre will actually be on a longer, four-year HEC Studentship programme leading eventually to a PhD; during this, they take a number of courses at the Training Centre followed by an HEC research project. This all leads to an additional qualification, the MSc in High Performance Computing. The entire training programme is funded by the UK's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).To combine the PhD and MSc programmes successfully, HEC students are formally enrolled as part-time students at the University of Edinburgh. The will usually visit us for two blocks of seven or eight weeks for the taught part of the course, spread out over their first three years of study. This will alloy them to meet and share experiences with their fellow MSc students without having to spend too long away from the institution where they are doing the PhD research.The training that we provide covers a wide range of useful and exciting areas in HEC. This includes how to write high-quality computer programs, how to make programs go fast on the world's largest supercomputers, how to use Grid technologies to harness the intemet effectively, visualisation of scientific results and the mathematical tools and techniques that underpin computational science and engineering.Graduates of the MSc in HPC will have acquired skills that make them employable in a wide range of future careers ranging from postdoctoral academic research beyond their PhD, to jobs in commercial Information Technology.