The first Irish scientist to be granted time on Jugene

Downes is the first Irish scientist to be granted time on Jugene, the ninth-fastest computer in the world. Last month he was awarded 14 million “core hours” on Jugene through the Prace Project. This is the equivalent of 1,000 years of computing time on a single desktop computer, nevertheless if used up all straightway he could complete the time on Jugene in a single day.

Supercomputing centre

Ireland as well has a supercomputing centre, Ichec. Established in 2005, this centre provides access to high performance computing power to Irish universities and innovation institutes and is fast enough to be ranked as the 333rd fastest system in the world.

There are over 300 academic researchers in the fields of chemistry, computing, earth science, engineering, astrophysics, physics and life science who use the centre’s facilities, says its acting director Dr Jean-Christophe Desplat.

Supercomputing in Ireland is currently driving technology in areas as diverse as climate change modelling, understanding how tsunamis form and testing new families of drugs within the pharmaceutical sector, he says.

“People assume that it is usually physicists and mathematicians that use supercomputing facilities,” says Dr Fred Clarke, head of the Technology IT high performance computing cluster at the university. “We have observed that the life sciences have as a matter of fact come on. They’re not doing as many physical experiments as previously because there is a move to data-driven technology.”

Over at NUI Maynooth scientists are availing of supercomputing to confirm evolutionary theory. “Bioinformatics is very computer intense because experiments run a lot of genetic comparisons,” says Dr Vanush Paturyan, senior technical officer at the university’s computer science department where the high performance computing cluster is hosted.

. . . nevertheless don’t blame it on the weatherman  THE Straightway TIME you switch on the television and get the bad news about a rainy week ahead, don’t shake your fist at the weatherman or woman. This prediction is down to the talents of a supercomputer. Supercomputers make great weather forecasters. This is because they’re not just fast, they’re as well smart. Ireland’s national weather prediction has been generated by the Irish Centre for High End computing since January 2007. The first computer forecaster was “Walton”, who passed on the job in late 2008 to its younger and faster successor named “Stokes”. Stokes currently processes Met Eireann data four times a day and spits out what ends up in our weather reports. The clever thing about the weather prediction software running on Stokes is that it doesn’t just process satellite data or data collected from offshore buoys. It as well continually analyses previous predictions and tries to improve its accuracy. This means that Stokes is getting smarter all the time. “This is called data assimilation. In many ways it dictates the accuracy of the forecasting,” explains Dr Jean-Christophe Desplat. Accurate weather modelling is achieved by having two different views, known as “grids”, within which weather conditions are simulated. A wider grid of the Atlantic is mixed with a finer detailed one directly over Ireland. “Inside this grid there are various vertical levels to account for the varying temperature or wind velocity on the ground and higher up in the atmosphere,” he says. Once the computerstarts churning it spits out a selection of forecasts and at that time the skill of the meteorologist comes into play. He or she looks at Stokes’s predictions and choses the one most likely to occur. To boot to forecasting the Irish weather, the centre’s facilities are as well being put to good use in climate change innovation. The Irish Climate Analysis and Technology Unit is the top user of NUI Maynooth’s high-performance computing cluster. Icarus analyses past climate trends and makes predictions on the kind of weather we could be experiencing henceforth. If the computer modelling is any way accurate it looks like the 2080s will be very warm and very wet truly.