High-Performance Computing (HPC) Showcase at the BT Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition

In January 2013, ICHEC will showcase all things supercomputing at the BT Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition (BTYSTE) to primary and secondary level students. At the stand in the World of Science & Technology Hall ICHEC will display a fully configured live mini "supercomputer" built from the relatively cheap Raspberry Pi boards, 3D scientific visualisations of climate and weather data, present the latest in accelerators/coprocessors and run introductory sessions into HPC, networking, and parallel programming languages.

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Stand Description

The stand will be divided into three areas: 1) Mini supercomputer; 2) NVIDIA K20 Demo; 3) Live presentations.

Mini Supercomputer

A fully operational cluster, PICHEC, will be constructed from 8-networked Raspberry Pis (RPis) and will be housed in a transparent enclosure so that students can see the inner workings of the parallel machine. Coloured cables (Power, Ethernet) will be used to visually aid the students to understand how the cluster was constructed and how all the networked RPis can work as one. The mini cluster will be built as described by Prof. Simon Cox from the University of Southampton in the UK and connected to a display to view various parallel computations including: a parallel Game of life and ray tracing demo. An additional RPi will be used to allow students interact will the individual components of the board.

NVIDIA K20 Demo

The latest technology from NVIDIA will be showcased at the stand where galaxy collisions are demonstrated.

Presentation Schedule

At our stand we will be giving presentations every half hour on all things supercomputing. Each session we will be able to accommodate between 10-12 students. The presentations will give an historical perspective of computing and outline the need and use of supercomputing. Introductory sessions on Linux, parallel programming, the largest supercomputers in Europe and how we built the Raspberry Pi Supercomputer will be delivered. We will also introduce the latest in new software and hardware technologies including the Intel Xeon Phi, and NVIDIA Kepler acceleration devices.

A 3D visualisation suite will be constructed at the stand and demos at the end of each presentation will be delivered. These include:

• Ash Cloud Model: A low-resolution chemistry-aware climate model of the ash cloud over Europe during 2010.
• HARMONIE Model: Numerical weather model, HARMONIE, currently been used by Met Éireann in Ireland and other countries explored at 2.5km and 0.5km resolutions. A cloud-resolving regime can be realised at a higher resolution.
• Irish Sea: An ECOMSED sedimentation model of the Irish Sea from Prof. Harnett’s group in NUI, Galway used to track pollution from Sellafield (Nuclear waste treatment facility).

Learning Outcomes

The following key messages will be addressed at the stand:

• Concepts and uses of HPC
• Computing DIY
• Networking – an introduction
• Parallel execution
• 3D visualisations of scientific data
• Intro to Linux, Python, parallel languages such as OpenMP, and MPI
• Intro to HPC in Europe: PRACE and the Research Infrastructure
• Latest in technology/many-core programming

The following questions will be answered by visiting the stand:

• What is Supercomputing/High Performance Computing?
• How is a supercomputer built?
• What problems can a supercomputer solve?
• What is parallel computing?
• Can I program in parallel on my desktop at home?
• How do scientists view their data?
• What is 3D, 4D? Advantages of using visualisation techniques?
• How are General Purpose Graphic Processing Units used for computations?

Register Interest

If you would like to book a slot during the exhibition please email with your name, school and which presentation you would like to attend. Note: Teachers wishing to block book should provide the number of students that will attend bearing in mind that there is limited space (10-12 students) per session. Attendees of the presentations will be in with a chance to win a Raspberry Pi Starter Kit and Book.