Issue 142 June/July 2015 CONTENTS Laboratory Informatics Profile Delivering an end-to-end R&D solution
Sophia Ktori profiles IDBS and its interest in analytics as part of informatics A marketplace in the Cloud
Continuing her profiles of informatics companies, Sophia Ktori looks at the novel technology of Core Informatics
Delivering data for environmental protection
Colin Gray describes how the people and the environment in Scotland are better off thanks to informatics soſtware
High-Performance Computing Parallel programs need new maths
Tom Wilkie and Robert Roe reflect on the issues facing Europe's HPC community that were raised at the PRACEdays15 meeting in Dublin
How do you measure a supercomputer's speed?
What benchmarks should be applied as supercomputing approaches exascale, asks Adrian Giordani
Cool ways to save energy
Tom Wilkie admires the engineering ingenuity that goes into keeping computers cool
Software softens energy demands
Soſtware to save energy in HPC may also help mobile phone networks, asTom Wilkie discovers
Accelerating the development of HPC
Robert Roe looks at how accelerators and co-processors are driving the design of new HPC systems
HPC in Frankfurt
We preview some of the exhibitors, their products, and services that will be on display at ISC High Performance in Frankfurt in July
Applications Climate, clusters, and cooperation
Robert Roe finds that weather forecasters face the same issues the world over
Resources Suppliers' directory
The challenge of change for informatics software Gloria Metrick looks at how long-established vendors are keeping their soſtware up to date
EDITORIAL AND ADMINISTRATIVE TEAM Editor-in-chief Dr Tom Wilkie
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Specialist reporters Robert Roe, Sophia Ktori, Gloria Metrick, Adrian Giordani Circulation/readership enquiries Jesse Lund
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47 44 38 34 26 22 16 10 4 6
Festival in Frankfurt
In July, slightly later in the year than usual, more than 2,600 scientists, engineers, vendors, component suppliers, soſtware developers, and users of high-performance computing (HPC) will assemble in Frankfurt for Europe's biggest supercomputing conference and exhibition. With a change of venue and (very slight) change of name, ISC High Performance will take place from 12 to 16 July. Some of the event's themes are prefigured
in this issue of Scientific Computing World, for example by our report on the PRACEdays15 conference in Dublin in May (page 16) which provided an insight into the concerns of Europe's HPC community. Cooling will be a hot topic and it is a
testimony to the ingenuity of engineers that so many different options are now available to cool current and future supercomputers, as Tom Wilkie discusses on page 26. But soſtware also has a role to play in energy efficiency, as reported on page 34. Te Top500 list of the world's fastest
computers will be released at the event, focusing attention once again on how best to measure the speed of a supercomputer (page 22), and on the growing role of accelerators and co-processors in the fastest systems, as Robert Roe reports on page 38 in the latest of his series of articles on novel processors and hardware. Of course, there is a lot more to scientific
computing than HPC. Colin Gray from the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency describes how its staff gained more confidence in their own data as a result of informatics soſtware. A programme to make their data available through a single Informatics Hub not only improved the Agency's efficiency, it also served a wider democratic purpose because members of the public can access the data, and conduct their own analyses, online. Computers for democracy, anyone?
Tom Wilkie Editor-in-chief
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