UKHEC Annual Seminar 2000: Developments in High End Computing

University of Manchester, 5/12/2000

`9:00-9:30`	Registration and Coffee
`9:30-9:45`	Martyn Guest - Daresbury Laboratory	Welcome and Background to UKHEC
`9:45-10:45`	David Bulivant (Keynote Speaker) - University of Auckland	Visualization and HPC: a mutually beneficial relationship
`10:45-11:00`	Coffee
`11:00-11:45`	Martyn Guest - Daresbury Laboratory	Beowulf Cluster Systems and Benchmarking
`11:45-12:30`	Mark Bull - EPCC	Java and Jini Technologies for Computational Science and Engineering
`12:30-13:30`	Lunch
`13:30-14:15`	John Brooke and Jo Leng- MRCCS	The role of Visualisation and VR in e-Science
`14:15-15:00`	Rob Allan - Daresbury Laboratory	e-Science and the Computational Grid
`15:00-15:15`	Coffee
`15:15-16:00`	David Henty - EPCC	UKHEC Support for HPC Researchers: Training and Professional Development

Abstracts of talks

Visualization and HPC: a mutually beneficial relationship

Visualization is increasingly becoming an essential tool in large computational simulations. With the increase in the size and complexity of the data produced on high-end machines, researchers need aids which enable them to use their scientific intuition to evaluate such output. At the same time, the visualization of such datasets is such a computationally demanding task that it also needs high-performance systems. Dr David Bullivant from the Bioengineering group at the University of Auckland will describe the experience of a group where HPC and visualization have a mutually beneficial relationship. We hope this will stimulate a lively discussion and Dr Bullivant will be working at MRCCS for the whole of the week, during which time he will be available to discuss these issues with UK researchers.

Java and Jini Technologies for Computational Science and Engineering

Java and Jini have some potentially significant advantages for High End Computing. This talk will discuss both advantages and shortcomings of these technologies, and describe efforts underway to address the latter. We will also briefly present three projects at EPCC which are relevant to this area: the Java Grande Benchmark suite, JOMP, an OpenMP-like interface for Java, and JiniGrid, a resource broker service for Java task farms.

The role of Visualisation and VR in e-Science

The term eScience was used by John Taylor of OST in his keynote address at the UK HPC Users Group on September 19th. eScience allows researchers to collaborate over the Internet and allows remote users access to experimental facilities and large-scale computational simulations. Such access is being agressively pursued in the US (and increasingly in Europe and Japan) and is one of the driving forces in the development of GRID computing. In this talk we describe the UKHEC Visualization Case studies and reports and show how they have been of benefit to users of UK High End Facilities. We also look at projects which will enable UK researchers to collaborate with colleagues in Europe, the US and Japan.

UKHEC Support for HPC Researchers: Training and Professional Development

Although the UK research community has been at the leading-edge of High Performance Computing for many years, the fundamental concepts and techniques are yet to find their way into the formal teaching programs of the majority of science and engineering degrees. Researchers often acquire knowledge in specific areas themselves, but this expertise is lost to the research group when the individual moves on; this is a particular concern in a rapidly developing field such as HPC. In this talk I detail the various ways in which UKHEC provides training and professional development opportunities to aid HPC researchers in their current and future careers, including seminars, workshops, courses and reports.