NAIS News Page
Congratulations to NAIS Research Associate Dr Chris Fensch who has been awarded a five-year Royal Academy of Engineering Fellowship to continue his work on Auto-tuned Programming Patterns for the Heterogenous Parallel Programming Challenge. RAEng Research Fellowships are designed to promotoe excellence in engineering. They provide support for high-quality engineers and encourage them to develop successful academic research careers. The process is highly competitive and we are delighted that Chris has achieved this recognition.
Congratulations to NAIS researchers Chris Fensch and Murray Cole who have won an award from the Samsung Global Research Outreach Program. Chris, Murray and PhD student Alex Collins will work with researchers from Samsung's R&D Center on a project investigating tools and techniques to support the development of portable auto-tuned programs for heterogeneous parallel systems.
Congratulations to NAIS lecturer Vijay Nagarajan, who has won a UK India Education and Research Initiative award from the British Council. The award will support travel and collaboration with the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, to pursue research on power efficient and high performance data prefetching techniques for multi-core processors.
A NAIS postdoc position is available at Heriot Watt beginning this autumn link
Cora Cartis (U of Edinburgh) has received a first grant from the EPSRC for work on "Optimal Newton-Type Algorithms for Large-Scale Nonlinear Optimization". The grant is a collaborative NAIS co-funded project and will bring to NAIS another postdoctoral researcher to work on problems relevant to operations research. link
NAIS will sponsor a workshop on algorithms and applications of MD, including methods for exploiting high performance computers. The workshop is preceded by a tutorial which will introduce key issues in the design of modern, efficient software for molecular dynamics. link
A new EPSRC-funded research network has been established by a partnership of the University of Manchester and NAIS. The purpose of the network is to build an interdisciplinary community at the numerical algorithms/HPC interface and thereby provide added value to existing funded research in numerical algorithms and in HPC and its applications. he activities of the network will be - seminars, - graduate courses, - short courses, - a workshop on the interface between NA and HPC, in which HPC users (including HECToR users) will be encouraged to describe the computational requirements of their applications and NA researchers will describe their latest algorithmic developments, - an international workshop, - an industrial workshop, - hosting of international visitors, and - movement of node members (and especially their PhD students and PDRAs) between nodes for visits of a day to a few weeks.
The former UK Chief Science Advisor discusses the need for major investment in High Performance Computing on the BBC Radio Today Programme (listen to the final minute) link
NAIS has now hired 4 lecturers (Vijay Nagarajan- Informatics, Edinburgh; Ozgur Ergul - Mathematics, Strathclyde; Magnus Svard - Mathematics, Edinburgh, and Sebastien Loisel - Mathematics, Heriot Watt). See the people page for info and links to home pages.
General-Purpose Graphics Processing Units are changing the landscape of high performance computing, with the current number one theoretical peak performance supercomputer Nebulae based GPUs. On October 26th you will have the opportunity to hear about the abilities of GPUs for high performance computing, directly from two of the nVIDIA researchers: Chris Butler and Timothy Lanfear. This workshop will include both an introduction to the architecture and capabilities of the new Tesla series GPUs, as well as exemplar applications. link
NAIS has commissioned a survey of the algorithm and software development needs of the UK's HPC-aware Scientific Computing community. link
Congratulations to NAIS Research Associate Dr Chris Fensch who has been awarded a five-year Royal Academy of Engineering Fellowship to continue his work on Auto-tuned Programming Patterns for the Heterogenous Parallel Programming Challenge.
RAEng Research Fellowships are designed to promote excellence in engineering. They provide support for high-quality engineers and encourage them to develop successful academic research careers. The process is highly competitive and we are delighted that Chris has achieved this recognition.
Congratulations to NAIS researchers Chris Fensch and Murray Cole who have won an award from the Samsung Global Research Outreach Program. Chris, Murray and PhD student Alex Collins will work with researchers from Samsung's R&D Center on a project investigating tools and techniques to support the development of portable auto-tuned programs for heterogeneous parallel systems. link
NAIS will sponsor a workshop on algorithms and applications of MD, including methods for exploiting high performance computers. The workshop is preceded by a tutorial which will introduce key issues in the design of modern, efficient software for molecular dynamics. link
This PhD project involves the development and analysis of approximate methods for partial and stochastic differential equations, along with the linear algebra needed to make them work efficiently. The goal is to develop highly efficient numerical algorithms suitable for modern high performance computers, from the now commonplace desktop dual and quad-core computers, through the upcoming multi-core desktop machines and on to high-end national research laboratory scale computers. The equations arise in the modelling of real-world problems (e.g. in the energy sector, medicine and biology) and the project will involve interactions with the end-users.The studentship is provided by Heriot-Watt University in support of the NAIS project.
We offer a lively, supportive and highly research-active environment for graduate students in Mathematics at Heriot-Watt, embedded in the Maxwell Institute for Mathematical Sciences partnership with the University of Edinburgh as well as the NAIS project. Students with a good first degree or MSc in mathematics with knowledge of numerical analysis, differential equations and some analysis would be ideal. Training is available in numerical analysis and in high performance computing. link
A grant was awarded following the EPSRC HPC Algorithms Sandpit to a team from the Universities of Manchester, Leeds, Edinburgh, Hull and Strathclyde. Dr Mark Bull from NAIS partner EPCC will lead the Edinburgh part of the project. Summary: The project aims to enable a step change in the performance of a wide range of real world applications, by applying and improving existing asynchronous algorithms for large sparse systems, and developing and analyzing entirely new asynchronous algorithms. The project will develop prototype software implementations of these algorithms which demonstrate both scalability and reliability. In the implementation of the software we will address the diversity of hardware platforms and programming models which will be found in future generations of machines, with at least 1 million cores. Another key aspect will be to exploit the inherent fault-tolerant nature of asynchronous algorithms to help address the need to cope with frequent hardware failures in extremely large machines. The software will be integrated into our two exemplar applications (bone modelling and power grid management), enabling them to carry out entirely new science as a result of enhanced problem resolution and reduced time to solution. link
NAIS will provide HPC training for all staff connected to the project, and, on a space available basis, staff from other institutions. Dates: 15 February, 22 February, 1 March 2010. There will also be a more in-depth training workshop in Summer 2010. See the links on the NAIS Events page link
Andreas Grothey (Edinburgh-Mathematics) will act as deputy to Iain Duff (Rutherford Appleton Lab) on the European Exascale Software Initiative, organised by a consortium of European leaders in HPC. The main goal of EESI is to build a European vision and a roadmap to address the challenge of Peta and Exascaling computation and simulation. This will be done by involving large numbers of European actors in the HPC sphere, investigating how Europe is located in the overall international HPC landscape and competition, its strengths and weaknesses, and the topics and challenges that Europe may and must develop. EESI will also identify the sources of competitiveness for Europe induced by the development of Peta/Exascale solutions and usage.
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NAIS has received matching funds from the UK's e-Science Institute and the EPSRC-funded Research Network on Mathematical Challenges of Molecular Dynamics (MD-NET) to run an international meeting June 30-July 3, 2010. From the overview of the meeting: "...As uniprocessor performance increases tail off, the search is on for new types of (molecular modelling) methods that can continue to offer speed increases in the setting of distributed hybrid architectures, or the grid. An interesting recent development which is becoming prominent in the molecular simulation literature is the reformulation of molecular modelling in terms of path sampling strategies, whereby multiple trajectories are used to probe complex configurational pathways, often disturbing thermodynamic equilibrium to enhance mobility or to force rare transitions. These multiscale molecular algorithms are well suited to implementation in an event-driven distributed computing setting... "
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Magnus Svard, previously based in Oslo, has been hired to a NAIS Lectureship at the University of Edinburgh. Magnus works on numerical analysis problems related to computational fluid dynamics. Ozgur Ergul from Bilkent University (Turkey) has been hired to a NAIS Lectureship at the University fo Strathclyde. He works in parallel simulation of electromagnetic problems. Vijay Nagarajan has taken up a NAIS Lectureship in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. Vijay studies compilers, computer architecture and software engineering, in particular in the setting of multicore technology.
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NAIS's launch event took place on October 21. Coming on the heels of the NSF-NAIS Workshop on Intelligent Software: the Interface between Algorithms and Machines the Launch Event featured a superb public lecture by Marc Snir (University of Illinois) on Key Challenges in High Performance Computing: Algorithms and Programming Environments for Petascale and Beyond. This was followed by a fine reception in the new Informatics Forum and a dinner at St Leonards Hall. Photos Below from the Launch Event.
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| The stunning new Informatics Forum at the University of Edinburgh provided an excellent setting for the Launch Event. |
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| Marc Snir demonstrates Illinois-style parallellism. |
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| Cora Cartis (Edinburgh-Maths) discusses with Phillippe Toint (NAIS Advisory Board) and Nick Gould (Rutherford Appleton Lab). |
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| Liz Jessup (Colorado) and Iain Duff (Rutherford Appleton Lab). |
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| Photo from NSF-NAIS Workshop on Intelligent Software |
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| At the reception |
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| Strathclyde's Dean of Science Iain Hunter and Edinburgh's Head of College of Science and Engineering Nigel Brown (PI on the NAIS project). |
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| Ben Leimkuhler (NAIS Director) in discussion with Rudolf Roemer, the director of Warwick's Centre for Scientific Computing. |