Luigi Del Debbio, The University of Edinburgh – Visions of Computing

Abstract

Computing has witnessed the most exciting growth over the last few decades. As we enter the era of Exascale computers, Computing is having a major impact on our lives across multiple disciplines. ‘Visions of Computing’ tries to capture some of the ideas, challenges and projects that are currently associated with Computing. Based on my personal research experience, but also on my work in defining the current European landscape in High-Performance Computing, I will present an overview of the opportunities, the complexity and the challenges that we are facing.  

Biography 

Luigi Del Debbio is a physicist based in Edinburgh, known for their work in theoretical physics, particularly in the areas of quantum field theory and lattice gauge theories. Their research often explores the fundamental aspects of particle physics and the underlying structures of the universe. Del Debbio is actively involved in teaching and mentoring early-career scientists in the field. Their work emphasizes both theoretical insights and computational methods, bridging the gap between abstract theory and practical applications.  

Del Debbio has been associated with various European initiatives aimed at enhancing high-performance computing (HPC) capabilities. Their efforts have facilitated international collaborations, enabling researchers across Europe to tackle challenging scientific problems more efficiently. Through their engagement in HPC, Del Debbio not only promotes scientific innovation but also advocates for the importance of computational techniques in modern research, emphasizing their role in addressing fundamental questions in physics and other disciplines. 

Following the success of our “Day Zero” activities last year we included an extra pre-CIUK day again on Wednesday 4 December.

The first two events included on CIUK 2024 Day Zero are:

The CoSeC Annual Conference: once again be co-located with the CIUK Conference and will take place in the CIUK Breakout Room on Wednesday 4 December.

Technical/SysAdmin Meetup: A meeting for technical staff and systems administrators to discuss the latest topics in the field and share information and ideas.  This was an unconference-style event, where the technical staff are able to steer the discussion to a variety of topics of interest.

STEP-UP –  developing HPC technical professionals: The STEP-UP project aims to change the landscape for digital Research Technical Professionals (dRTPs) within the London and South East of England region, while sharing developments, approaches and findings with the wider community, across the UK and beyond.We class dRTPs as anyone undertaking work related to software, data and computing infrastructure / High Performance Computing (HPC) within the research community.

: Their 2024 meeting will take place alongside CIUK 2024 and will be located in the meeting rooms above our exhibition hall.

The CIUK 2024​ Research Zone allows all EPSRC Tier-2 Centres, and other sites with significant size computing facilities, the opportunity to join the CIUK exhibition and update attendees on their progress. Delegates can visit them in the exhibition hall to find out about their systems, discuss potential projects and discover how to get access. 

The CIUK 2024 Cluster Challenge was our biggest yet with sixteen teams competing for the title of Cluster Challenge Champions.

As with previous events the format consisted of a number of online challenges in the build up to the conference, followed by a series of in-person challenges during the event in Manchester.

Following an amazing series of challenges and a very close fought battle the winners and CIUK 2024 Cluster Challenge Champions were Team Decarb – a team made up of students from Warwick University and Imperial College London. With three individual challenge wins from the six challenges completed they were very deserving winners but were pushed very closely in the end by ClusDur from Durham University and (u)CLI from University College London who occupied the second and third positions. With just twenty-five points separating the top six positions on the leaderboard it is clear that the standard was extremely high.

We now look forward to supporting Team Decarb as they go forward to represent Team CIUK at the ISC’25 Cluster Challenge in Germany in the summer of 2025.

As always we would like to thank out challenge partners who provide their support, mentorship and access to their systems to allow the challenges to go ahead. Our CIUK 2024 partner companies were Alces Flight, OCF, Logicalis and DDN.

Team registration for the CIUK 2025 Cluster Challenge will open in the summer of 2025.

CIUK 2024 included a number of breakout sessions that ran in parallel to the main programme of presentations. These included

•  CoSeC Annual Conference 2024
• Technical/SysAdmin Meetup
• ​​STEP-UP –  developing HPC technical professionals
• Lustre User Group 2024 Meeting
• Portable benchmarking and profiling using ReFrame
• Cybersecurity and Federation for National DRI, AI and HPC Resources
• Women in HPC​ Breakfast
• ​Storage Scale (GPFS) User Group / New Users Session
• ​ExCALIBUR Hardware and enabling software: Exploring next generation technologies for HPC
• UKRI National Federated Compute Services NetworkPlus

In 2019 we lost an incredibly important member of the CIUK Scientific Advisory Committee with the sudden and unexpected passing of Jacky Pallas at the age of just 54. Jacky was head of e-Research at King’s College London and for the previous three years had been an active and vocal member of the CIUK Scientific Advisory Committee, helping to shape the direction our event has taken and pushing through many positive changes, whilst championing diversity and the inclusion of young researchers.    

In her memory, and in recognition of her passion for our conference, we introduced an annual award that will highlight the work of an early career researcher and will allow the award winner a slot in the main programme at CIUK.  Researchers will be nominated by their supervisors and we are looking for nominations for presentations that highlight the impact of a project that early career researchers have been working on, or have completed. 

Congratulations to the winner of the CIUK2024 Jacky Pallas Memorial Award – Lisa Lampunio 

Abstract 

A key aspect of this scientific computing research is to address challenging problems within the nuclear energy sector, such as the development of multiphysics modelling and simulations (M&S) of thermal fatigue phenomena within nuclear power plants (NPPs) and the design of novel radiation detection technologies. Thermal fatigue phenomena are widespread within many areas of engineering and can limit the operational life of components, cause power outages, and require costly periodic inspections. Therefore, high-fidelity predictive models enable engineers to improve the reliability of engineering components and optimise maintenance scheduling. The development of novel radiation detection technologies is critical not only in the nuclear power sector but also for nuclear security and safeguard. Both these fields require the application of advanced high-performance computing (HPC) M&S along with uncertainty quantifications (UQ), surrogate modelling (SM), and machine learning (ML) algorithms. This research work aims to develop computationally efficient and improved M&S methods as well as advanced, cost-effective, radiation detector designs with benefits to both the engineering community and the nuclear energy sector. 

Biography 

I hold a Bachelor and Master’s degree in Nuclear Engineering from the University of Pisa in Italy and a PhD from the Nuclear Engineering Group of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Imperial. My research work has been focused on developing high-fidelity multi-physics modelling and simulations and efficient data-driven machine learning surrogate models for critically important problems for nuclear power plant safety and control, such as thermal fatigue phenomena in T-junction pipes and design optimisation of neutron detectors within the reactor core.  

A final selection of nine posters were on display at CIUK 2024 with a panel of judges scoring based on a set of pre-determined criteria. The finalists were:

Kiran Jonathan, STFC/UKRI – Accelerating Research with HPC: A Collaborative Study of Space Charge Compensation in H- Ion Sources

Gokmen Kilic,  Durham University – Visualising HPC Node Performance via Swift ReFrame Benchmark and Grafana

Jinjiang Li, University of Manchester – MetaWAAM: Real-Time Digital Twin Architecture for Direct Energy Deposition-Arc Manufacturing

Terence Lobo, STFC/UKRI – Accelerating High-Order Finite Difference Methods for Turbulence and Combustion Using CUDA Fortran

Zeyuan Miao, University of Manchester – Using PINNS to predict temperature due to neutronic heating fusion power plants

Aadya Mudgil, University of Warwick – On Optimal Resource Allocation Algorithms

Maitrayee Singh, STFC/UKRI – MD-based spectroscopic simulations in Py-ChemShell

Raska Soemantoro, University of Manchester – A case study of real-time collaborative design in FreeCAD and NVIDIA Omniverse

Yazhmozhi Vasuki Murugesan, University of Dundee – Tamil Spell Checker

Our congratulations go to the winner of the CIUK 2024 poster competition Zeyuan Miao from the University of Manchester for his poster on “Using PINNS to predict temperature due to neutronic heating fusion power plants”.