NEW HPC SUPPORT MECHANISMS

Daresbury Laboratory and University of Edinburgh are collaborating with University of Manchester to provide future HPC support.

Future Mechanisms for HPC Support from EPSRC

The current funding for the three UK HPCI Centres ended at the end of October 1999. The future HPC support mechanisms which were approved by EPSRC's High Performance Computing Strategy Committee (HSC) in June 1999 are now in place following the response to calls for proposals from centres for both Dedicated Consortium Support and Core Activities.

The Dedicated Support funding from EPSRC now contains two strands:

Support for the existing scientific consortia is continuing at Daresbury and EPCC until their current research grants end. In addition to this consortia previously mapped to Southampton have been re-assigned to either Daresbury or EPCC as follows:

Future requests to EPSRC for Dedicated Support for individual research groups should be made to the appropriate Research Council. Other Research Councils are currently making their own arrangements.

Core Support Activity

EPSRC provided separate funding, via a call for proposals, for a Core Activity to track and disseminate information on developing standards in software and tools and to promote good programming practice. This is to be provided by the "UKHEC Collaboration", a collaboration between Daresbury, EPCC and the Manchester Research Centre for Computational Science (MRCCS).

The UKHEC Collaboration will investigate underlying HPC issues relating to hardware and software technology which might enhance the effective use of HPC resources in the UK. This includes programming languages (e.g. C, Java, Fortran95), software engineering and QA, data management, visualisation and VR, and meta-computing. Technical reports will be produced and short courses and workshops held in key areas. Information will be announced via HPCProfile and the Web pages (see below).

New HPCI Web pages

EPCC and Daresbury Laboratory are collaborating to provide a new Web pages with appropriate URL for their diverse HPC activities. Links to all the supported consortia and related activities will be provided via these pages which will complement those at CSAR. The draft pages can be found at http://www.cse.clrc.ac.uk/ListActivities/CLASS=5;CLASSTYPE=43; Please note that the URL will be simplified shortly. We have applied to UKERNA for DNS addresses www.hpci.ac.uk and www.ukhec.ac.uk . We invite your comments on the kind of material you would like to see here.

HPCProfile

The last issue of HPCProfile in its current form appeared in December 1999. As a part of the UKHEC collaboration we shall be producing two issues a year starting in 2000 devoted to HPC programming techniques and underlying computing issues. This will be supplemented by other material which will provide information on the Dedicated Consortium Support, CCPs and Distributed Computing Programme (DisCo).

Further Information

In addition to looking at the existing Web pages you can contact:

Robert Allan
Department for Computational Science and Engineering
Daresbury Laboratory
Daresbury
Warrington WA4 4AD
r.j.allan@dl.ac.uk
01925 603207
http://www.cse.clrc.ac.uk/Activity/HPCI

David Henty
Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre
JCMB, Maxwell Buildings
University of Edinburgh
Mayfield Road
Edinburgh EH9 3JZ
Scotland
d.s.henty@epcc.ed.ac.uk
0131 650 5960
http://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/t3e/hpci

Terry Hewitt
Manchester Computing
University of Manchester
Oxford Road
Manchester M60 9PL
w.t.hewitt@mcc.ac.uk
0161 275 6095
http://www.man.ac.uk/mrccs
http://www.csar.cfs.ac.uk

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