Over 550+ people attend Alces Flight presentations on COVID-19 and Biomedical Education at SC’20

Supercomputing (SC’20) has gone virtual — and the move have resulted in record attendance for Alces Flight projects.

Yesterday’s State of Practice talks, part of the Supercomputing (SC’20) Technical Program, were to date the highest attended Alces Flight presentations for a global supercomputing conference.

Over 550+ people from around the world gathered to hear talks presented by the University of Liverpool and CompBioMed Centre of Excellence as they went through their respective presentations on AI imagining analysis for COVID-19 and training in biomedical sciences.

Fresh off their nomination for the HPCwire Reader’s Choice Award, the University of Liverpool kicked-off the Alces presentation run — showcasing the power of their hybrid HPC solution design in the race to diagnose COVID-19. Dr. Yalin Zheng and lead researchers Joshua Bridge and Yanda Meng discussed the techniques used in analysing and modelling data from multiple sources — while the Advanced Research Computing (ARC) team at Liverpool, Alces Flight, and AWS walked attendees through how the cluster environment — Cloud Barkla — was architected and run.

Following Liverpool were several first-time HPC conference authors presenting on their experience training on the QIIME2 application in the cloud. Lead by Andrea Townsend-Nicholson and Art Hoti (both of UCL) and Andrew Narracott of the University of Sheffield, this presentation focused heavily on how cloud can elevate education in supercomputing. Most exciting was the level of participation from the medical students at the University of Sheffield who readily answered questions before — during — and after the session on how remote learning in HPC impacted their studies.

Both live presentations gathered over 275 views each with the replays now available for technical badge holders for the next six months. If you want to grab a replay of the University of Liverpool then click here, and for the CompBioMed presentation, click here.

We’ll be bringing you more from these projects in the coming weeks. In the meantime if you want to learn how we built out the hybrid and cloud HPC solutions you can get in touch with us today!