The Hartree Centre is a high performance computing and data analytics research facility founded by the UK government in collaboration with IBM. The centre is part of the Science and Technology Facilities Council, one of seven UK Research Councils, and is based at Daresbury Laboratory on the Sci-Tech Daresbury science and innovation campus in Cheshire, UK.
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Background
The Hartree Centre was formed in 2012 with £37.5 million government funding for research into supercomputing and takes its name from English mathematician and physicist Douglas Rayner Hartree. The centre’s purpose is to provide UK industry and academia with access to advanced high performance computing technologies, expertise and training to boost UK economic growth. The centre was allocated an additional £19 million for research into energy efficient computing and big data, such as that which will be generated by the Square Kilometre Array. In the 2014 Autumn Statement, government announced a further investment of £115 million for the centre over five years, to fund future scientific discovery in research areas including cognitive computing and big data analytics. This was part of the Northern Powerhouse strategy to boost economic growth in the North of England.
Technologies
The Hartree Centre hosts two supercomputing platforms, Blue Joule (an IBM Blue Gene/Q) and Blue Wonder (IBM NeXtScale and iDataPlex computers), alongside large scale GPFS storage, an IBM data analytics platform, Maxeler FPGA system, Nvidia GPU and Intel Xeon Phi technologies, and immersive 3D-enabled visualisation suites. In November 2014, the TOP500 project ranked Blue Joule as the 4th most powerful non-distributed computing system in the UK and 30th in the world. (In June 2012, the year of its installation at Daresbury Laboratory, it was ranked at 1st and 13th respectively.)
Energy Efficient Computing
In 2012, the centre was awarded government funding to strengthen UK competitiveness in areas including big data and energy efficient computing. Energy efficient computing is becoming an influential research topic for the future sustainability of high performance computing. To tackle this sustainability challenge, the Hartree Centre is carrying out research which takes a holistic view of parallel computing systems, including the optimisation of software to make it run more efficiently, low power architectures, data storage, cooling methods and other factors. In 2015 Lenovo entered into partnership with the centre to develop energy efficient computing solutions using an ARM-based server prototype.
Work With Industry
The Hartree Centre works with academic researchers and companies in a wide range of industries, on projects including software development and optimisation, big data analytics, collaborative R&D and training.