The University of Edinburgh is one of Europe’s leading research universities. It is the Project Coordinator of the CRESTA proposal and is represented in this project by its supercomputing centre, EPCC. Established in 1990, the organisation is one of Europe’s leading supercomputing centres with a full-time staff of 75, most educated to postgraduate level, and with a large array of HPC systems including ARCHER, the 3008-node Cray XC30-based UK National HPC service. EPCC is works with a wide variety of scientific and industrial partners. Collaborative projects with industry represent 50% of the Centre’s annual turnover (£4.8 million in FY09/10 excluding capital costs). EPCC has led the UK’s technical work in the PRACE and PRACE-1IP projects and will lead all of the UK’s involvement in PRACE-2IP.
In addition to its role as a national HPC service provider, EPCC provides a wide variety of services to both industry and academia including: HPC application design, development and re-engineering; HPC application performance optimisation; distributed computing consultancy and solutions (with a particular focus on Grid and Cloud computing); HPC facilities access; project management for software development; and data integration and data-mining consultancy. The organisation has considerable experience of managing large, complex EU-funded projects including the successful NextGRID Integrated Project (which focussed on Grid computing architectural research) and the eDEISA project. It also plays a leading role in many other projects including DEISA and DEISA2 (where it has led the benchmarking and training activities, and managed the DEISA Extreme Computing Initiative), HPC-Europa, BEinGRID and PRACE as discussed above.
The centre has a long history of working with HPC vendors to design leading-edge novel HPC systems including the QCDOC system, the Maxwell FPGA system and, most recently, Bluegene/Q.
In 2009 EPCC established the Exascale Technology Centre at Edinburgh jointly with Cray and as part of Cray’s European Exascale Research Initiative. With a team jointly funded by both organisations, the Exascale Technology Centre in Edinburgh is exploring new ideas and new technologies to meet the challenge of delivering an Exaflop within the next decade and will work in parallel and closely with CRESTA.
EPCC offers two taught Master of Science (MSc) programmes: MSc in High Performance Computing and MSc in High Performance Computing with Data Science.
