ARCHER2 celebration of science

The ARCHER2 celebration of science event is intended to allow users to showcase their science achievements on ARCHER2. As the UK’s national supercomputer, the ExCALIBUR programme has used ARCHER2 extensively throughout many different projects and there will be ExCALIBUR involvement at this event.

There will be an ExCALIBUR table, where we will have details about the programme and some merchandise to give away. This will be a great opportunity to connect with the programme and find out some of the interesting activities that are taking place. There will also be an ExCALIBUR poster at the event, summarising the different parts of the programme an how leveraging supercomputers such as ARCHER2 has driven many of the scientific discoveries made in ExCALIBUR over the past five years.

Several individuals who are involved in ExCALIBUR are also giving talks at the celebration of science event. Sylvain Laizet from Imperial will be talking about the UK turbulence consortium where the computational power of modern supercomputers such as ARCHER2 is critical in helping drive new discoveries. Sylvain also leads the ExCALIBUR Turbulent Flow Simulations at the Exascale: Application to Wind Energy and Green Aviation high priority use-case, and this is one of the key activities being undertaken by the consortium. During the poster session, Paul Bartholomew will be presenting a poster about enhancing the Xcompact3D framework with ADIOS2 to help address the much larger problem sizes that supercomputers can handle. Xcompact3D is used by ExCALIBUR and the fact that Paul’s work meant that the model is now able to approach the theoretical limit of IO on ARCHER2 is important and impressve.

Grenville Lister, who is heavily involved in the ExCALIData project, will be talking about the Atmospheric and Polar Sciences Consortium which he leads. Atmospheric science has been a major driver to many of the ExCALIBUR projects as weather and climate simulations represent an exascale workload. This has been an important use-case that many ExCALIBUR projects have worked with during their research, and indeed the Met Office have driven several projects including ExCALIData which is exploring data storage and data workflows at the exascale. Furthermore, there is a poster presentation about work done on the MONC atmospheric model in a recent eCSE project to optimise this on ARCHER2 and extend the flexibility of the model. This code, and a variety of its underlying algorithms, have been used by several ExCALIBUR projects for benchmarking and evaluation.

Phil Hasnip will be giving a talk about the UK Car-Parrinello Consortium (UKCP) which is a group of researchers across the UK who develop quantum mechanical techniques for studying atomistic systems. The PAX-HPC high priority use-case, which Phil is very involved in, works heavily with this consortium leveraging the tools and techniques that are developed and also feeding back to the wider group of researchers. One of the key tools used and developed by both UKCP and PAX-HPC is CASTEP, and there are also two posters at the event exploring work undertaken in eCSE projects to optimise this code. The first is exploring the work undertaken to optimise CASTEP for Open Boundary Conditions (OBCs) and in the presence of a solvent, and the second will describe optimisation of the FFT component of the simulation tool.

It promises to be a busy and informative couple of days, more details and sign up (until 29th) is available here.