Alces Flight heads to (Virtual) Supercomputing — SC’20

This year the Alces Flight team is participating in not one, but two HPC State of the Practice presentations covering hybrid and cloud HPC.

The Flight Crew is back — albeit virtually — to participate once again in the annual Supercomputing (SC’20) convention. This conference, like so many other events, has moved online… but… this move is allowing global participation and a chance for more voices to be heard in the HPC community… so it’s even better.

We are excited to announce that two of our projects were selected for HPC State of Practice talks, both taking place on November 17th. These talks feature speakers covering the entire range of the projects, allowing you to hear more first hand accounts of what it is really like working in hybrid and cloud HPC.

First up we have Rapid Re-Purposing: How the Foresight to Replicate Their HPC Cluster in the Cloud Fuelled the University of Liverpool’s COVID-19 Research. Some of our readers may remember Liverpool’s SC’19 presentation on Cloud Barkla during the HPC Impact Showcase. We’re proud to say that Cloud Barkla is back, and this time it’s looking at how to diagnose patients with COVID-19 using AI and GPU technology. Presented with our partners, Amazon Web Services, this talk covers how the university took their concepts from on-premise, to cloud, and back again. This talk starts at 1:00 PM Eastern time with replays available for Technical Program badge holders. The team has also received a HPCwire Reader’s Choice nomination for their work on this project — so congratulations to the Liverpool research teams for this recognition!

Following at 3:30 PM Eastern we start Demystifying the Dark Arts of HPC: Introducing Biomedical Researchers to Supercomputers with the CompBioMed Centre of Excellence. This consortia — including UCL and University of Sheffield — has come together to create nUCLeus, an unfederated HPC cluster environment on public cloud. Why did they do it? To be able to bring researchers anywhere in the world working in biomedical sciences into HPC. This talk discusses the nUCLeus build, optimisation, and impact that it is making on training and education today — and in the future of exascale to come! We are excited that this talk will be presented in part by upcoming researchers — including first-time HPC students from the University of Sheffield Medical School.

Both of these talks are part of the paid Technical Program for SC’20 — so be sure to register if you want to be part of the live Q&A. Can’t make it to this event? Don’t fret — we’ll be breaking down the work done by both of these teams in the weeks following Supercomputing.

Look forward to seeing you online on November 17th!