We are excited to announce that researchers who use our advanced computing facilities have been recognised as award winners in the HPCwire 2021 awards! Advanced Research Computing is very proud to provide the BEAR computing facilities to support life changing research at the University, which has again been internationally recognised in these highly competitive, global awards. For more details on the awards and the research involved have a read of the press release below…
St. Louis, MO — November 15, 2021 — University of Birmingham has been recognised in the annual HPCwire Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards, presented at the 2021 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC21), in St. Louis, Missouri. The list of winners was revealed at the HPCwire booth at the event, and on the HPCwire website, located at www.HPCwire.com. University of Birmingham was recognised with the following honours:
Working with the University of Birmingham School of Chemical Engineering, clinicians from the Royal Orthopaedic Hospital developed a physical model of an operating theatre with 3D measurements of equipment and an ultrasound anemometer to measure airflow in 3D. Using University of Birmingham’s BlueBEAR HPC (Lenovo, with Intel CPUs and IBM Spectrum Scale Storage, supplied by OCF Limited), within their model, they tracked particles in the air that emerges from the necks of surgical gowns which can contaminate surgical instruments, lead to infection, and increase patient suffering, which also places a greater financial burden on the United Kingdom’s National Health Service.
The work at Birmingham was a collaboration between Andrew Thomas (Clinical Sciences) and the School of Chemical Engineering.
The COVID-19 Genomics UK (COG-UK) Consortium expanded its CLIMB-COVID project, using hardware from DDN, Dell, Lenovo and others to sequence and aggregate over 675,000 coronavirus genomes and broadening the project to include samples from around the world.
Professor Nick Loman, Bio Sciences leads this project on behalf of University of Birmingham.
The BEAR team installed and provide ongoing support for the CLIMB-COVID project hardware which is located with the University’s Data Centres and continues to provide key insights into the variants of the COVID-19 with compute analysis running on the BlueBEAR HPC facility.
Both projects take advantage of the University’s supercomputing facilities (BlueBEAR) which form part of the wider range of BEAR services to support research activity at the University. The BlueBEAR system has recently been upgraded to over 20,000 cores to enable more processor intensive work in areas such as complex molecular simulations and particle tracking. All University researchers are able to take advantage of the standard BEAR services, from storage, supercomputing, code management or research software and data advices, all to support advances in science.
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 and are revealed each year to kick off the annual supercomputing conference, which showcases high performance computing, networking, storage and data analysis.
“Every year it is our pleasure to connect with and honour the HPC community through our Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards, and 2021 marked an exceptional showing of industry innovation,” said Tom Tabor, CEO of Tabor Communications, publisher of HPCwire. “Between our worldwide readership of HPC experts and an unparalleled panel of editors, the Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards represent resounding recognition throughout the industry. Our congratulations go out to all of the winners.”
More information on these awards can be found at the HPCwire website (http://www.HPCwire.com) or on Twitter through the following hashtag: #HPCwireAwards.
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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.
