We’re really pleased to announce that again in 2018, University of Birmingham has won an HPCwire Readers’ Choice Award, this year for Best Use of HPC in Manufacturing!
Each year the Advanced Research Computing team put in a number of nominations for these prestigious awards to help showcase the research using BEAR and HPC services across campus. This year we had four shortlisted nominations which are then voted on by readers of HPCwire. In 2018, the award was one for the research undertaken by members of the PRISM2 research group in Metallurgy and Materials Science using the BlueBEAR HPC service.
The University of Birmingham has been recognised in the annual HPCwire Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards, presented at the 2018 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC18), in Dallas, Texas. The list of winners was revealed at the HPCwire booth at the event, and on the HPCwire website, located at www.HPCwire.com. The University of Birmingham was recognised with the following honour:
- Readers’/Editor’ Choice: Best use of HPC in Manufacturing
The coveted annual HPCwire Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards are determined through a nomination and voting process with the global HPCwire community, as well as selections from the HPCwire editors. The awards are an annual feature of the publication and constitute prestigious recognition from the HPC community. These awards are revealed each year to kick off the annual supercomputing conference, which showcases high performance computing, networking, storage, and data analysis.
The PRISM2 group, a research centre at the University of Birmingham and a Rolls Royce University Technology Centre (UTC) – one of a global network of research centres providing long term research relationships, undertakes modelling of materials and manufacturing using the University’s central HPC and storage systems provided by Advanced Research Computing. The award was received for work with industrial partner Rolls Royce with whom the PRISM2 group are currently engaged in a long-term collaborative project. This project with Rolls-Royce and the innovative research conducted by PRISM2 plays a key part in ensuring that the technology employed by Rolls-Royce helps the UK stay at the forefront of advanced manufacturing, particularly in the aerospace sector.
Professor Jeffery Brooks, Director of PRISM2 and Hanson Professor of Industrial Metallurgy at the University of Birmingham said, “The models we develop for manufacturing simulation are computationally very demanding and require huge amounts of resource and the BlueBEAR HPC facility is essential in supporting my team”.
Ben Saunders, Materials and Process Modelling group at Rolls Royce added “The use of HPC in the Materials and Manufacturing functions at Rolls-Royce is fundamentally changing the way we will work in the future. We are able to do things with simulation that would have been impossible just a few years ago. The ability to rapidly optimise material compositions and manufacturing processes before we produce a physical specimen or run a manufacturing trial can save us years of development time in addition to providing a much richer dataset to our design colleagues enabling us to extract the maximum possible component performance“.
The BlueBEAR facility uses Lenovo HPC direct-to-node water cooled systems with Mellanox SwitchIB-2 based EDR InfiniBand. Storage is provided using IBM Spectrum Scale and IBM Spectrum Protect and jobs are scheduled using the SLURM scheduling system. The system is designed and integrated by the University’s Advanced Research Computing team and supplied by OCF, the University’s framework supplier for research computing systems.
OCF is a UK based high-performance compute, storage and data analytics integrator. Business Development Manager, Georgina Ellis, commented, “We’ve (OCF) worked with University of Birmingham over a number of years. The framework agreement enables the Advanced Research Computing team access to a wide variety of vendors, and the team know what they want to deliver and engage with a wide variety of partners to deliver value for the researchers at Birmingham”.
“This year marks the 15th anniversary of The HPCwire Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards. These awards serve as a pillar in our community, acknowledging major achievements, outstanding leadership and innovative breakthroughs.” Said Tom Tabor CEO of Tabor Communications, publisher of HPCwire. “Receiving an HPCwire award signifies an undeniable community support and recognition. We are proud to acknowledge our winners this year and as always to allow our readers voices to be heard. I would like to personally congratulate each and every one of our winners, as their awards come well deserved.”
More information on these awards can be found at the HPCwire website (http://www.HPCwire.com) or on Twitter through the following hashtag: #HPCwireAwards.
About HPCwire
HPCwire is the #1 news and information resource covering the fastest computers in the world and the people who run them. With a legacy dating back to 1986, HPCwire has enjoyed a legacy of world-class editorial and journalism, making it the news source of choice selected by science, technology and business professionals interested in high performance and data-intensive computing. Visit HPCwire at www.hpcwire.com.
About University of Birmingham
PRISM2 is a research centre at the University of Birmingham, with expertise in the modelling of materials, manufacturing and design for high technology applications in the aerospace and power generation sectors. It is located in the Interdisciplinary Research Centre (IRC) on the University of Birmingham’s Edgbaston campus. There are strong links with the Manufacturing Technology Centre (MTC) and High Temperature Research Centre (HTRC) based at Ansty Park, Coventry. See www.prism2.org for more information.
Advanced Research Computing is part of the central IT Services department at the University of Birmingham and the team includes systems, outreach and research software engineering teams to help Birmingham’s researchers deliver world leading research. Founded in 1900, the University of Birmingham is a research-intensive University and a member of the prestigious Russell group of Universities.
See www.birmingham.ac.uk/bear for more information, tweet @uob_rescomp.