These are the slides for my talk on HPC Midlands at the Hartree Centre's "HPC As A Service for Industry" event at STFC Daresbury Labs in January 2013. For more information on the HPC Midlands project, please see http://hpc-midlands.ac.uk

1. Martin Hamilton, Centre Manager
hpc-midlands.ac.uk

2. Contents
• UK e-Infrastructure initiative
• HPC Midlands
• Industrial engagement
• Lessons learned &
opportunities

3. UK e-Infrastructure Programme
• OSI e-Infrastructure Working Group
• RCUK e-Infrastructure Advisory Group
• £158m BIS e-Infrastructure investment
• Tildesley Report: http://goo.gl/VSw4x
• Regional HPC consortia funded via EPSRC

4. UK e-Infrastructure Programme
• OSI e-Infrastructure Working Group
• RCUK e-Infrastructure Advisory Group
• £158m BIS e-Infrastructure investment
• Tildesley Report: http://goo.gl/VSw4x
• Regional HPC consortia funded via EPSRC
• “Eight Great Technologies”, including £189m
for Big Data & Energy Efficient Computing

5. What is HPC Midlands?
• HPC on demand, delivered via JANET
• Consortium of Loughborough University &
University of Leicester
• Managed service delivered by Bull
• ISV support, e.g. ANSYS and CD-adapco
• Funded by EPSRC/BIS e-Infrastructure
initiative (£1m hardware grant + ‘recurrent’)

6. Hera, the HPC Midlands cluster
• 3,000 cores (48 Teraflops)
• 11 chassis (18 blades each)
• 15TB RAM
• 120TB Lustre storage
• Non-blocking QDR Infiniband
• 188 compute node blades
– 2 x 2.0GHz (8 core) Sandy Bridge
– 140 with 64GB RAM (4GB/core)
– 48 with 128GB RAM (8GB/core)

7. HPC Midlands Applications
Large Eddy Simulation of
Premixed Combustion in Spark
Ignition Engines.
Prof. W. Malalasekera
Dr. A. Clarke
C. Ranasinghe

8. HPC Midlands Applications

9. HPC Midlands Applications
Large Eddy Simulation of Crossflow
Vortices on an Infinite Swept Wing
V. I. Mistry
G .J. Page
J. J. McGuirk
42nd AIAA Fluid Dynamics
Conference
DOI: 10.1016/j.paerosci.2011.12.002

10. HPC Midlands Applications

11. HPC Midlands Applications
CFD Based Study of Unconventional
Aeroengine Exhaust Systems
T. Coates
G. J. Page
30th AIAA Applied Aerodynamics
Conference
DOI: 10.2514/6.2012-2775

12. Industrial Engagement

13. Industrial Engagement
Strategic partnerships
Local / Regional firms & initiatives
Science Parks and Incubators

14. HPC Midlands Case Study – E.ON
Key points:
• Steady state, complex geometry,
simple physics.
• Simulations with 24 to 128 cores
• 6 different meshes used from
4.5 to 80 million cells
• Speed-ups from 30 to 145 times
observed vs. in-house system
ANSYS CFX simulation of
leak in gas turbine enclosure

15. HPC Midlands Case Study – E.ON
Normalized Timings for HPC Runs
CPU core time per million cells
180 169.31
Grid 1 4.5M elements 24 cores
160
per 100 iterations (s)
Grid 2 8M elements 48 cores 140
120
Grid 3 15M elements 48 cores 93.18
100 84.81
Grid 4 25M elements 60 cores 80 67.62
Grid 5
60 39.18
45M elements 128 cores 36.81
40
Grid 6 80M elements 128 cores 20
0
Grid 1 … … … … …
“Straightforward to use, secure and fast” 
“Biggest advantage is for jobs that:
 Have large parameter spaces
 Are time dependent
 Have complex geometry
 Have very complex physics
 A combination of the above”

16. Lessons Learned
• Making the connection
• Paperwork
• Software licensing
• IPR, NDA and other TLAs
• Plumbing
• Sneakernet
• Connectivity
• Moonshot

17. Paperwork – Software Licensing
user@hpc-midlands.ac.uk

18. Plumbing - Connectivity

19. Plumbing - Connectivity

20. Plumbing - Connectivity

21. Plumbing - Project Moonshot
• JANET(UK) initiative
• Like eduroam, but for any protocol
• Use your existing credentials everywhere
• Securely tunnelled back to home RADIUS server
• Applicable to academia and industry?
• 18 month pilot, kickoff in April
• https://www.ja.net/products-services/janet-
futures/moonshot

22. Martin Hamilton, Centre Manager
hpc-midlands.ac.uk