Computing Insight UK

Computing Insight UK (CIUK) has grown over the years to become the UK’s leading HPC conference. With a range of talks, breakout sessions, exhibits and a poster session, this is always a busy conference. Held at the start of December at Manchester Central Convention Complex, the success in recent years has meant that this year’s CIUK will be located in a larger suite of rooms at the convention centre.

ExCALIBUR will have a booth at CIUK and this will be present throughout the event. So please drop by and say hello, we will be able to answer questions about the programme and also have a range of branded merchandise.

H&ES breakout session

There will be an H&ES breakout session on Friday 6th December in Exchange Rooms 6 and 7 between 11am and 1pm

Time	What	Who
11:00 – 11:05	Welcome and aims	Nick Brown
11:05 – 11:20	AIRRFED: Federated access to compute	Sadaf Alam
11:20 – 11:35	Durham H&ES testbeds	Alastair Basden
11:35 – 11:50	Graphcore and UCL testbeds	Owain Kenway
11:50 – 12:05	FPGA and Cerebras testbeds	Maurice Jamieson
12:05 – 12:10	RISC-V testbed	Nick Brown
12:10 – 12:20	Hardware requirements for particle simulation	Phil Hasnip
12:20 – 12:30	Swirles: Intel GPU testbed at Cambridge	Marek Szuba
12:30 – 12:40	A view from the bridge	Martin Hamilton
12:40 – 13:00	Panel discussion

Talks in the main conference

There are two ExCALIBUR talks in the main CIUK conference programme. Alastair Basden will be talking between 3pm and 3:30pm on Friday 6th about the Durham HPC hardware laboratory. This has, in part, been funded by ExCALIBUR H&ES and contains a range of experimental and production hardware including the Rockport, BlueField and AMD GPUs. The later was recently enhanced with eight MI300X AMD GPUs to enable scientific computing and AI workloads to experiment with this important new technology. Alastair will be reflecting on the range of hardware provided, along with highlighting some of the key activities around sustainability and what the future holds for the laboratory.

Nick Brown will be talking between 3:30pm and 4pm, also on Friday 6th, about the RISC-V testbed which was also funded by H&ES. RISC-V is an open Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) which, since it was first developed around a decade ago, has shipped in around 20 billion devices. Whilst RISC-V has enjoyed phenomenal growth in many areas, it is yet to become mainstream in HPC. But times are changing, and we are seeing more RISC-V high performance hardware along with significant enhances in the software ecosystem. Nick will describe the latest advances in this technology and why the CIUK community should be interested in it.