HPC news
HIGH-PERFORMANCE COMPUTING
Healthcare ‘revolution’ with new
computer program network A massive network of computer programs co-created by University of Manchester scientists could revolutionise healthcare around the world, saving countless lives and billions of pounds. Working with a number of partners, the academics have been awarded funds from a huge European research programme to create ‘virtual patients’ – computational models of individual people – which could lead to everyone having their own individually-tailored health system based on their genetic and physiological make-up. Under the system, doctors would be able to have an instant, in-depth knowledge of an individual patient’s health needs and medical history at
their fi ngertips. This will allow GPs to and quickly diagnose illnesses and conditions correctly, saving patients from potentially deadly side effects of wrongly-prescribed medicines and saving huge amounts of money on drugs.
The University of Manchester researchers are part of a pan- European, 10-year project, called IT Future of Medicine (ITFoM), costing €1bn. This project has been allocated €1.5m preliminary funding. A consortium of more than 25 academic institutions and industrial partners with expertise in ICT, the life sciences, public health and medicine have come together to begin the process of bringing the project to life.
STFC chooses secure data archive solution
Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) at the UK’s Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) is using Tessella’s Safety Deposit Box (SDB) to manage part of its scientifi c data archive. David Corney, head of data
services at RAL, said: ‘SDB integrates perfectly into our scientifi c data archive.’ The selection follows a successful pilot project used to evaluate the practicality and effectiveness of SDB for storing part of RAL’s data. Initially, datasets from the ISIS neutron spallation experiments will be collected and
CIELO SUPERCOMPUTER COMMENCES WEAPON SIMULATIONS
The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has begun production runs focusing on high resolution 3D weapon simulations on NNSA’s largest supercomputer platform, Cielo. The simulations will be used to ensure the safety, security, and effectiveness of the nuclear stockpile while maintaining the moratorium on underground nuclear explosive testing. Users from NNSA’s laboratories – Los Alamos (LANL), Lawrence Livermore and Sandia laboratories
– are using Cielo for NNSA’s Capability Computing Campaign 2 (CCC2). ‘The body of work done on Cielo is one of the largest and most demanding workloads involving modelling and simulation within NNSA. Cielo is primarily utilised to perform milestone weapons calculations,’ said Don Cook, NNSA’s deputy administrator for defence programmes. ‘The research we’re able to do in computer science, physics, and engineering because of Cielo is a vital part
of NNSA’s efforts to implement President Obama’s nuclear security agenda.’ Cielo, a petascale resource for conducting NNSA weapons simulations in the 2011-2015 timeframe, can achieve more than one quadrillion fl oating point operations per second. During May 2011, the Cielo system was upgraded from 1.03 petafl ops (72 cabinets) to 1.37 petafl ops (96 cabinets). After the hardware upgrade, the Cielo operating system was also upgraded.
Mongolian centre orders Cray supercomputer The National Agency of Meteorology
and Environmental Monitoring (NAMEM) in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, has ordered a Cray XE6m supercomputer.
NAMEM specialises in weather forecasting and climate projection integration in Mongolia, and will use its Cray XE6m system to perform regional weather and climate models for operational and research purposes.
16 SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING WORLD
The Mongolian terrain consists of steep mountains and rolling plateaus, and the country’s weather is characterised by extreme variability in both short-term weather and multi-year averages. With an economic sector that relies heavily on weather and climate for livestock and arable farming, a compelling need exists for a supercomputer capable of producing high-resolution weather forecasts. The Cray XE6m
ingested into SDB4, together with the metadata required to facilitate long-term management and preservation. SDB4 supports multiple data ‘tenants’ and it is expected that the pilot will be extended to other users such as the British Atmospheric Data Centre.
SDB has been used for many years to store digital assets in memory institutes, but its use in a scientifi c environment is new. RAL is at the leading edge of digital archiving of scientifi c data. SDB will enable RAL to assess the benefi ts of long-term data preservation to scientifi c research environments.
Hurricane research improved by supercomputer simulations
Information from major hurricanes of the past two decades such as Katrina is being put to good use by scientists striving to understand how hurricanes intensify. A research team led by Jon Reisner of Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) is employing the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility’s (OLCF’s) Jaguar supercomputer to use data from lightning detectors and even wind instruments mounted on planes fl own into the eye of a hurricane to improve atmospheric models. These simulations may lead to more accurate prediction of hurricane intensities.
system will give NAMEM the supercomputing resources necessary for increasing the resolution and accuracy of its weather forecasts and high-impact, extreme events. In addition to superior performance and reliability, NAMEM selected the Cray XE6m system over conventional commodity clusters due to the full-featured system software and application development environment.
IN BRIEF
Swift Engineering, which designs and fabricates composite structures, has selected Platform HPC as its management solution. It will be used for high-performance vehicle design testing and simulation
www.scientific-computing.com
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