Hartree Centre

The Hartree Centre is a high performance computing and data analytics research facility founded by the UK government in collaboration with IBM.^[1] The centre is part of the Science and Technology Facilities Council, one of seven UK Research Councils, and is based at Daresbury Laboratory on the Sci-Tech Daresbury science and innovation campus in Cheshire, UK.^[2]

Background

The Hartree Centre was formed in 2012 with £37.5 million government funding^[3] for research into supercomputing and takes its name from English mathematician and physicist Douglas Rayner Hartree. The centre’s purpose is to provide UK industry and academia with access to advanced high performance computing technologies, expertise and training to boost UK economic growth.^[4] The centre was allocated an additional £19 million for research into energy efficient computing and big data, such as that which will be generated by the Square Kilometre Array.^[5] In the 2014 Autumn Statement, government announced a further investment of £115 million for the centre over five years, to fund future scientific discovery in research areas including cognitive computing and big data analytics.^[6] This was part of the Northern Powerhouse strategy to boost economic growth in the North of England.^[7]

Technologies

The Hartree Centre hosts two supercomputing platforms, Blue Joule (an IBM Blue Gene/Q) and Blue Wonder (IBM NeXtScale and iDataPlex computers), alongside large scale GPFS storage, an IBM data analytics platform, Maxeler FPGA system, Nvidia GPU and Intel Xeon Phi technologies, and immersive 3D-enabled visualisation suites. In November 2014, the TOP500 project ranked Blue Joule as the 4th most powerful non-distributed computing system in the UK and 30th in the world.^[8] (In June 2012, the year of its installation at Daresbury Laboratory, it was ranked at 1st and 13th respectively.^[9])

Energy Efficient Computing

In 2012, the centre was awarded government funding to strengthen UK competitiveness in areas including big data and energy efficient computing. Energy efficient computing is becoming an influential research topic for the future sustainability of high performance computing.^[10][11][12] To tackle this sustainability challenge, the Hartree Centre is carrying out research which takes a holistic view of parallel computing systems, including the optimisation of software to make it run more efficiently, low power architectures, data storage, cooling methods and other factors. In 2015 Lenovo entered into partnership with the centre to develop energy efficient computing solutions using an ARM-based server prototype.^[13]

Work With Industry

The Hartree Centre works with academic researchers and companies in a wide range of industries, on projects including software development and optimisation, big data analytics, collaborative R&D and training.

Notable Projects

• The Hartree Centre has a long-term partnership with Unilever^[14] to develop their R&D processes and make better use of high performance computing, specifically computer aided formulation. One of the research projects undertaken resulted in an “app” that focuses on ease of use to put complex supercomputing tools in the hands of chemists. The tool is claimed to enable product experimentation that would previously take a week to be carried out in 40 minutes.^[15]
• In 2014 the centre ran a competition in partnership with the Open Data Institute and IBM. Entrepreneurs were allowed to submit their concepts to use publicly available open data for commercial applications. The winning ideas were given time on the Hartree Centre machines with IBM data scientists to prove their concept was commercially viable. One winning company, UK SME Democrata, has created a tool through the project, which analyses and maps open data from a variety of archaeological, geological and land based sources to help large construction and infrastructure companies and projects to predict risk and avoid disturbing sites of historical significance.^[16][17] The tool uses two components of IBM Watson and Hadoop data repositories.^[18]
• In June 2015, Minister for Universities and Science Jo Johnson announced a renewed partnership between the Hartree Centre and IBM^[19] which provides the centre with access to £200 million worth of IBM's data-centric and cognitive computing technologies and expertise, including IBM Watson.^[20][21]

References

1. "Chancellor tours Sci-Tech Daresbury supercomputer centre following £113m Government investment". Runcorn & Widnes Weekly News.
2. "Capabilities - High Performance Computing". Sci-Tech Daresbury.
3. "Scientist to benefit from exascale supercomputer deal". The IET.
4. "£30m grant announced by George Osborne at Daresbury Science Park". Retrieved 21 May 2015.
5. "£30 million to lead global computing technology". STFC. Retrieved 21 May 2015.
6. "Weaver Vale MP - £115 million funding for Hartree Centre". Chester on the web.
7. "Northern powerhouse: Chancellor visits science hubs in the north-west". Gov.uk.
8. "TOP500 List - November 2014". TOP500.
9. "TOP500 List - June 2012". TOP500.
10. "Some computer science issues in creating a sustainable world". 17 Nov 2008. Retrieved 24 Jun 2015.
11. Buyya, Beloglazov, Abawajy. "Energy-Efficient Management of Data Center Resources for Cloud Computing: A Vision, Architectural Elements, and Open Challenges" (PDF). The University of Melbourne, Australia. Retrieved 24 June 2015.
12. Berl, Gelenbe, Giralamo, Giuliani, Meer,, Dang, Pentikousis. "Energy Efficient Cloud Computing". ResearchGate. University of Passau, Imperial College London. Retrieved 24 June 2015.
13. Judge, Peter (19 Feb 2015). "Lenovo and UK boffins optimize ARM servers for HPC". Retrieved 26 June 2015.
14. Begum, Sheila (20 Feb 2013). "Unilever forms partnership with The Science and Technology Facilities Council". Manchester Evening News. Retrieved 26 June 2014.
15. "HPC 'App' for Industry Stresses Ease of Use". HPC Wire. 8 April 2014. Retrieved 24 June 2015.
16. Rutkin, Ava. "Data archaeology helps builders avoid buried treasure". New Scientist. Retrieved 26 June 2015.
17. Evans, Jon (9 April 2015). "Big data and archaeology". Orange Business Blog. Retrieved 26 June 2015.
18. Clark, Lindsay. "Businesses dig for treasure in open data". Computer Weekly. Retrieved 26 June 2015.
19. Clay, Oliver (4 June 2015). "Daresbury Laboratory in £313m big data deal with IBM". Liverpool Echo. Retrieved 25 June 2015.
20. Onita, Laura (4 June 2015). "£200m government deal with IBM to boost big data". Engineering and Technology Magazine. Retrieved 25 June 2015.
21. "VIDEO: Town to benefit from 'huge' economic boost after unveiling of £313m partnership deal". Warrington Guardian. 4 June 2015. Retrieved 25 June 2015.