Seminar about cloud computing and data centre

Title:  Building a supercomputer from scratch: why supercomputers are no longer all the same!

Time: 10-11am, Monday, 11 Feb

Venue: 185 Polly Vacher Building

Abstract: In this talk we begin by discussing some of the major scientific workflows that use supercomputing, concentrating on those in weather and climate science. While they have always been “big data” sciences, in the last decade the proportion of effort needed to output, analyse, archive and curate the data has grown, leading to the advent of a new class of supercomputer: a super-data-computer. In 2012, the UK deployed JASMIN, the first of this new breed – unique not only in architecture, but  also in including support for a full curated archive –  and in the following years, JASMIN has evolved, anticipating community requirements. At the same time, “normal” supercomputers have evolved, and we anticipate a Cambrian explosion in computing architectures as those building and deploying supercomputers try and innovate around the end of Moore’s Law. The talk concludes by outlining how computer science and mathematics which will be integral in surviving the introduction of hardware complexity and the end of ever increasing computational power at the same cost.

 Bio: Bryan Lawrence is the University of Reading Professor of Weather and Climate Computing based in both the Meteorology and Computer Science departments. He is the Director of the Models and Data division of the national centre for atmospheric science (NCAS), and is active in a number of European earth system modelling projects. He is the Principle Investigator for JASMIN, chair of the NERC HPC strategy committee, and still makes time to watch as much sport as he can!