Industrial Applications of High-Performance Computing

169

Chapter 11

Industrial Use of

High-Performance

Computing in the

United Kingdom

Mark Parsons and Francis Wray

11.1 INTRODUCTION

is chapter discusses the industrial use of high-performance comput-

ing (HPC) in the United Kingdom. It is partial and opinionated. For

a detailed census of available HPC systems and skills in the United

CONTENTS

11.1 Introduction 169

11.2 History 170

11.3 e U.K. HPC Ecosystem Today 172

11.3.1 Interacting with Companies in the United Kingdom 173

11.3.1.1 Developing a Business Mindset 174

11.3.2 Two Examples of Industry HPC Projects in the

United Kingdom 175

11.3.2.1 Integrated Environmental Solutions Case

Study 175

11.3.2.2 PROSPECT Case Study 175

11.4 Delivering Economic Benet 176

11.5 Factories of the Future: Fortissimo 177

11.6 Conclusions 178

170 ◾ Industrial Applications of High-Performance Computing

Kingdom, the reader is directed to http://www.slideshare.net/comth/

uk-national-einfrastructure-survey-2014-update-for-hpcsig-may-2014,

which is updated annually. Industry in the United Kingdom has a long

history of using modeling and simulation and the government has,

since the 1990s, encouraged collaboration between industry and aca-

demia through a number of programs with varying levels of success and

commitment. Despite the reticence with which many U.K. politicians

approach Europe, the United Kingdom has also been a key leader in sev-

eral large European industry HPC programs such as the HPCN TTN

(High-Performance Computing and Networking Technology Transfer

Node) program and most recently the FORTISSIMO project.

11.2 HISTORY

Since the 1940s, the United Kingdom was in the vanguard of the early use

of digital computers to model and simulate the world around us. Much of

the early work grew out of the war eort and as such, the use of HPC sys-

tems for product development by the defense sector was a key part of early

U.K. industrial usage. Such usage continues to this day but these early

pioneers have been joined by a broad array of business sectors represented

by companies both large and small.

e modern history of HPC in the United Kingdom dates back to the

1980s when the U.K. had an active and innovative hardware industry. It

was a period when the U.K. believed it could be a world leader in HPC sys-

tems through companies such as ICL (International Computers Limited),

INMOS (Inmos Limited, a British semiconductor company), and MEIKO

(a pioneer in low-latency scalable systems). Sadly, of course, this was not

to be and ICL’s Distributed Array Processor (DAP), INMOS’s line of

Transputer microprocessors and MEIKO’s Computing Surfaces (CS1 and

CS2) are consigned to history. However, this period in the late 1980s and

early 1990s remains an important one.

During these decades, vector machines such as the Cray-1 and Cray-2

dominated the worldwide HPC market. For U.K. academia and industry,

such systems vastly exceeded available budgets and so cheaper alternatives

with similar performance were developed, utilizing the then new comput-

ing paradigms of single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) and multiple

instruction, multiple data (MIMD) parallelism. Of course, the reduced

price came at a cost in terms of application complexity and portability. It

should therefore be no surprise that the United Kingdom was a leading

contributor to the message passing interface (MPI) library, MPI 1.0, in the