Advanced Computing Research Centre

News and Events

Recent Events

HPC Symposium Wednesday 21 October, 2009

The 4th HPC symposium was held on Wednesday 21 October. The theme of the symposium was Latest Trends in HPC. The presentations are available here.

News

HPC user shares in Gordon Bell award

As reported on the University's News page, Dr Rio Yokota, an HPC user from the Department of Mathematics was part of the team who won a Gordon Bell prize at SC09.

International modelling prize retained with the help of BlueCrystal

A team of students using BlueCrystal to model their simulations have won a gold medal and a prize for Best Model at iGEM 2009, the prestigious international competition in the field of synthetic biology. The team from the University's Bristol Centre for Complexity Sciences, who won a bronze medal and the Best Model prize at iGEM 2008, (as featured in our News Archive) retained the Best Model prize and upgraded their medal to gold.

The team's project, 'Vesecure' aims to improve communication between bacteria by developing new methods of packaging signals – a technique that could potentially play a role in many different fields, including drug delivery. The modelling work extended and improved an agent based computational framework developed by last year's team, called BSim. A range of new features were added, including a switch to a more realistic and computationally demanding 3D environment. However, the advance that most impressed the judges was the ability to incorporate multi-level models into the simulations. This allows for the biochemistry within a single cell to be modelled in parallel with physical interactions between populations of bacteria.

These types of simulation are computationally expensive, but using Blue Crystal, the team were able to run large numbers for a range of scenarios, helping to convince the judges of BSim's virtues.

Watch a simulation of one of the models on YouTube.

Member of HPC Executive interviewed about Virtualisation

Simon McIntosh-Smith was interviewed by Maggie Philbin in a Times supplement on virtualisation - pages 18-19
http://np.netpublicator.com/netpublication/n85269061.

Bristol HPC features in Scientific Computing World

Scientific Computing World have featured Bristol HPC in an article about how scientists are using HPC to predict climate and weather more accurately and efficiently - http://www.hpcprojects.com/features/feature.php?feature_id=228.

Re:search Supplement - High Performance Computing issue

We have produced a HPC themed re:search supplement with contributions from a number of HPC users. It gives an excellent insight into the research being done at Bristol using BlueCrystal. Many thanks to all the contributors.

Download a PDF version here.

If anyone would like a paper copy, please contact Caroline Gardiner.

There may be documents on this web page in PDF format. In order to view a PDF you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader.

News Archive

An archive of news stories and events is available here.