TGAC In The Spotlight At Largest Global Supercomputing Conference
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The supercomputing conference spotlights the most innovative and fascinating scientific and technical applications from around the world, bringing together the HPC (high-performance computing) community – with over 10,000 attendees.
Director Mario Caccamo, Head of Scientific Computing Tim Stitt and Paul Fretter from Norwich Bioscience Institutes (NBI) attended from TGAC. Tim Stitt presented a talk entitled, “Beyond Human – Sequencing the Complex Wheat Genome to Advance Global Food Security" at the annual SGI User Forum; one of only four invited talks from SGI's global customer base.
Tim also represented the UK and Europe at the annual gathering of XSEDE campus champions. XSEDE is a 5-year, $121 million US National Science Foundation project, for developing the most advanced, powerful, and robust collection of integrated advanced digital resources and services in the world.
“With an attendance of over 10,000 people the networking opportunities at the conference provided tremendous visibility for TGAC and its research,” said Tim Stitt, TGAC’s lead at the conference. “In addition to attending technical program presentations, myself, Mario and Paul attended many vendor briefings throughout the week with the leaders in HPC and supercomputing technology including SGI, Intel, Cray Inc. and IBM.”
At these closed-door sessions, attendees heard from each company about their upcoming technology roadmaps over the next 5-10 years. Such information is crucial to helping shape TGAC's own HPC roadmap so attendance at these meetings is vital to sustaining TGAC's computational leadership at the forefront of Bioscience.
TGAC’s research, in association with Intel, has also been promoted by a video recently shot onsite at the Institute that focuses on our HPC capabilities to sequence and assemble one of the most complex genomes, the bread wheat genome.
Robert Maskell, High Performance Computing at Intel, said: “Intel is delighted to welcome TGAC to SC14 where will continue our close collaboration to help accelerate the pace of discovery of TGACs research agenda.”
Simon Appleby, Life Sciences Manager (EMEA) at SGI, added: “SGI has been privileged to collaborate with TGAC to accelerate their highly recognized and valued research output since 2010. The high performance X86-64 shared memory ‘UV’ architectures procured by TGAC have allowed for rapid deployment when exploring cutting edge software, new algorithms and programming models without restrictions artificially placed by the fixed resources on a cluster node, such as memory. This freedom in computational capacity now allows TGAC biologists to assemble and analyse large and complex genome sequences entirely in memory, with extreme ease of use, which was not previously possible. We look forward to continued collaboration with TGAC to promote their research and capabilities on the international stage.”
Running alongside the SC14 technical program of around 5,000 participants, the SC14 Exhibition Hall hosts over 350 exhibitors featuring the latest and greatest technologies from industry, academia and government research organisations; many of these technologies will be seen for the first time in New Orleans. The keynote speaker at SC14 was physicist and best-selling author Brian Greene.
