High End Compute has now been appointed, after competitive tender, to a consultancy framework to support the Health Tech Hub based at UWE Bristol. HEC will be working with small to medium sized businesses in the West of England (NHS) region to bring to market new health tech products.
As well as hands on help getting models & data analyses to run faster or to scale out to larger problems, High End Compute can also provide expert opinion and help with writing research & funding grants, reducing your carbon footprint (and helping save money!), and strategic, independent, evaluation and requirements of your research/technical computing support portfolio.
High End Compute doesn’t just want to take a code, move it to another architecture or make it faster, give it back to you, take a cheque and walk away. We are keen to work with you to help pass on skills so that in future you can do it yourself or at least understand much better what is involved. And when we provide training we focus on your examples and offer a follow-on to discuss if there are further options for you to improve your model or data analysis.
2016 has been a busy initial year for High End Compute consultancy, and I would like to pass my thanks to each of you for your support. As I look forward to 2017, and the opportunities that it brings to work with several of you, I realise that I have capacity to do further work and would welcome discussing potential work or collaborations (full contact details in signature).
The key services that High End Compute provide are:
The third Emerging Tech conference, #EMiT2016, was held in Barcelona at the beginning of June. All papers are available in the conference proceedings alongside the presentations on the conference web site.
Over the winter nights I've been working to set up a straightforward procedure for anybody to build a cluster out of Raspberry Pi boards, the PiHub, a few USB (power) leads, a cheap un-managed LAN box and a couple of LAN cables. By using MPI for Python via the Rasbian python-mpi4py package it is now within reach for us all to do both distributed computing (using MPI) between RPis as well as threaded (using OpenMP) on the 4 cores of the Pi 2.
One's immediate thoughts are probably, "How much faster will things get in 2016?", or perhaps, "How will programming change in the next couple of years?". But one theme will trend increasingly: "How will we minimise the energy footprint of high end compute?"
So, you've bought a new accelerator (maybe one of the dev XPhi on promo in Q4 2014?) or co-processor, or commissioned a cluster.
What's the first thing you want to do? Yes, benchmark every aspect to check it all works as you expect.
You would probably use the Intel MPI Benchmark suite to see how well your MPI implementation is working. There's also the HPCC Challenge benchmarks to determine how typical applications might run.