Durham University is the third oldest university in the UK after Oxford and Cambridge. Located in the city of the same name (UNESCO World Heritage), a short walk from the castle, the cathedral and the River Wear, be surprised with In contrast to its various facilitiesAs in the case of the Bill Bryson Library, named after the famous American writer who lives in North Yorkshire.
In the field of the Department of Physics and the Institute of Computational Cosmology d. Alistair Barden, head of the COSMA HPC Service, highlights how his team has faced the daunting task of unraveling the study, through supercomputing, of the birth and evolution of the universe: “We perform cosmological simulations, from the beginning of the Big Bang to today.” As is.
‘Work in progress’ is possible thanks to AMD EPYC processors from AMDwhich allows for much larger simulation data sets with faster execution to speed up the process, with endeavors, in the case of Durham research, such as The MilleniumTNG-XXL Simulation, to represent the structure of the universe within ten billion light-years.
This modern search environment is integrated into an environment DiRAC Supercomputing, which has four campuses at universities in the United Kingdom. The latest results show the analysis of the mysterious “gas giants” of Jupiter, one of the largest studies of the atmospheres of exoplanets, carried out using high-performance computers (through 1,000 hours of observations with telescopes). or the project Sibeliusto produce the largest and most accurate hypothetical representation of the universe to date (more than a petabyte of data).
social use
Suggestion full of science fiction, based on it Sam SmallwoodSenior Field Applications Engineer at AMD, highlights the importance of technological adaptation: “Supercomputers are helping solve some of the world’s toughest challenges by simulating the complex interactions that underlie climate science, subatomic structure, genomics, physics, and medical research bionics, etc. Exascale supercomputers can perform a billion operations every nanosecond, enabling unprecedented speed of insights for these critical simulations.”
Smallwood also highlights the company’s leadership in High Performance Computing (HPC) powering the world’s fastest and most energy efficient supercomputers “as in the case of supercomputers.” borderPowered by AMD EPYC CPUs and AMD Instinct accelerators, which achieved No. 1 in the “Top500”, “Green500” and “HPL-AI” performance charts, an industry first. “
Other use cases highlighted by Smallwood are ” EPYC Processors, which “runs” the latest supercomputer of Thailand’s National Science and Technology Development Agency, providing the performance needed to advance research in medicine, weather forecasting and other fields. In addition, the Ohio Center for Supercomputing recently announced Ascend, a new HPC suite consisting of Dell Technologies PowerEdge servers with AMD EPYC processors.”
Also in Spain
In the case of Spain, as commented Rafael May Garciaresponsible for the Scientific Computing Line at the Center for Research on Environmental Energy and Technologies (Ciemat), “Supercomputing is managed by the Spanish Supercomputing Network, one of its nodes belonging to Ciemat. This center was a pioneer in the field of supercomputing in Spainfeaturing uninterrupted supercomputers since 1959 during which critical advances have been made in areas such as achieving fusion energy, innovation, nuclear safety, renewable energy efficiency, reducing atmospheric pollution, predicting radiation in people and materials or, more recently, successful new genetic therapies against those that They are considered “rare diseases”.
Mayo García also stresses the importance of the confluence of technology and energy: “Likewise, work is being done on the computer science itself so that these supercomputers become increasingly more efficient and consume less power.” Supercomputing has been applied and expanded to meet a much-needed need for global energy provision: “With these massive computations and their ability to handle massive amounts of data (known as ’21st century oil’), Simulation of different future energy scenariosThrough which we improve our consumption and reduce our dependence on energy in Europe.”
In addition to Ciemat, Spain has international references such as Barcelona’s leading supercomputing center – the National Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS), with more than 500 scientists and directors of the Spanish Supercomputing Network (RES). And in the case of the Center for Supercomputing and Visualization in Madrid (CeSViMa), in the UPM Science and Technology Park in Madrid, Magerit “supercomputer” It “travels” through the universe to analyze the data obtained by the space telescope James Webb (Through the JWST International Project). As in the case of the team led by Dr. Bardeen in Durham, they are about collecting and analyzing millions upon millions of data to find out what happened after the ‘Big Bang’.
