Hartree Centre at Supercomputing 2022

A team of nine staff from the Hartree Centre joined colleagues from Scientific Computing and Digital Infrastructure alongside 11,830 international attendees and 361 exhibitors to represent STFC at this year’s Supercomputing 2022 Conference (SC22) in Dallas, Texas. 

The STFC team had an action-packed week of activity at SC22, returning for the first time in 3 years to a large in-person exhibition and event programme. The team were kept busy running an exhibition booth, speaking on panels, upskilling in tutorials, building collaborative partnerships and sharing their research in workshops.​ 

Starting off the conference on Sunday 13 November 2022, the Hartree Centre’s Vassil Alexandrov co-hosted the ‘Latest Advances in Scalable Algorithms for Large-Scale Heterogeneous Systems‘ workshop, welcoming 150+ in-person delegates and 100+ online attendees

We had 5 invited visionary talks on new scalable approaches, with an interesting exchange of ideas and discussions around future collaboration

Vassil Alexandrov 

Colleagues from IBM Research presented a paper discussing novel in situ algorithms for tracking flow features characteristic of multiphase dispersed systems co-authored by the Hartree Centre’s Aiman Shaikh and Vassil Alexandrov during the ISAV 2022: In Situ Infrastructures for Enabling Extreme-Scale Analysis and Visualization workshop on Sunday too. 

The team also supported the Women in High Performance Computing (WHPC) workshop and Diversity Day during the conference with Hartree Centre’s Training and Events Manager, Nia Alexandrova commenting:  

We are first and foremost a community and it was wonderful to be in a welcoming forum where you had so many different voices discussing issues around diversity and equality.

Monday showed no sign of slowing down with the 9^th workshop on Best Practice in HPC Training and Education co-chaired by Nia Alexandrova with a presentation from Hartree Centre’s Stefano Mensa and Emre Sahin sharing their perspective on how to effectively train industry users of HPC systems, raise awareness of digital technologies and innovation and introducing our specialist HNCDI EXPLAIN training programme.   

Our stand at the SC22 exhibition was the best yet, featuring interactive demos of Lego Mindstorm robots, videos of our scientific visualisation work and posters displaying how we’re using HPC, AI and data science to benefit UK industry, society and the economy. 

After years of many events being cancelled or becoming remote, the Hartree Centre team enjoyed the renewed novelty of networking face-to-face, sometimes with collaborators, they had only worked with on a remote basis. It was fantastic to see a real-time demo on Graphcore’s exhibition booth of how we’re working together with the UK Atomic Energy Authority to accelerate AI for fusion energy. 

The Hartree Centre’s Director, Kate Royse and Systems Architect, Colin Morey took part in the International Association of Supercomputing Centre’s panel discussion on Wednesday with partners from Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Pawsey Supercomputing Centre.  

It’s clear that national supercomputing centres have lots of opportunities to collaborate on areas such as skills, procurement, culture, impact and more. We all have a mission to evangelise about the benefits and impact of HPC to our global community.

Kate Royse 

The Hartree Centre rounded off the week with Xiaohu Guo chairing a simulation and modelling paper session as part of the SC22 technical programme, convening experts from across the world to share their work from weather and climate modelling to reactor simulations and GPU acceleration for gravitational wave propagation.