Welcome to the Cray Centre of Excellence for HECToR
The Centre of Excellence is a Cray funded project to engage with HECToR's users to allow them to maximise their use of Cray technologies. The Centre comprises three dedicated Application Analysts with many years combined experience in CFD, computational fusion problems (Magneto Hydro Dynamics), and numerical weather prediction. This is complemented by PhDs and Masters degrees covering Applied Mathematics, HPC Algorithms, Numerical Analysis and Software Engineering.
With recent talks at CUG 2010 and a poster at SC10, the team is heavily involved in international HPC conferences and workshops. The CoE team has been instrumental in recent developments to important UK HPC applications such as HELIUM (Quantum Mechanics), UM (Climate Modelling), HiPSTAR (Jet Engine Turbulence), and GADGET (Cosmology).
The Centre is available to support users in porting applications or optimising performance and scaling on the Cray HECToR systems work as directed by its steering committee which can allocate grants of additional computational time to achieve specific scientific aims. The Centre is always interested in hearing from current or potential users of HECToR who would feel they could benefit from Centre of Excellence assistance. To contact us, please email the HECToR Helpdesk and mark the email FAO Cray Centre of Excellence.
Projects
HECToR is used for a wide variety of scientific applications and the Cray Centre of Excellence (CoE) engages with users from many different fields. As well as supporting users day-to-day on the Cray XE6, since July 2009 the Steering Committee has commissioned the Centre of Excellence to assist a variety of user projects.
In each of these projects we aim to bring best practice in software development together with a style and structure which fits comfortably into the existing software. The Centre of Excellence team has used a successful model of development; this involves co-locating with the scientific team for a significant period to both understand the challenge and the application and to develop the design.
Once the project is completed the project enters a code audit phase with the scientific team where changes are integrated into the existing source and thoroughly tested using a range of compilers, datasets and architectures to prove the robustness, durability and accuracy.
