For industrial visitors to our website, we provide on this page selected CompBioMed links and services of particular interest to you. Please check out the links on the column to the right, and stay tuned for more content. If you are interested in working more closely with us or visiting one of our partners for a collaboration, check out our Visitor Programme page for more information
Alces Flight and CompBioMed – Partnership in a ‘Cloudy’ User Experience
With public cloud now becoming a platform for High Performance and High Throughput Computing the team at Alces Flight has partnered with CompBioMed to explore, engage, and educate its members on methods and means to get ideas running faster than ever before. Once a curiosity, cloud HPC now has the power to take concepts that might not yet be ready for full-scale workflow design and allow researchers to test and try out concepts before they go into production. This revolution means some of the most compute-intensive work might not need to wait for exascale to arrive… it can happen right here, right now.
Alces Flight focuses on creating HPC environments on-demand. Our aim is to have individuals working in the cloud in minutes. Through our workshops and direct engagement in CompBioMed meetings we’ve been able to educate members on how to spin up public cloud clusters and show them how to quickly install applications, share our knowledge over ‘tricky’ applications, and gather feedback on what public clouds people are most interested in engaging with. Through our collaboration we’ve been able to write a quick-install guide for those wanting to use Galaxy on AWS, have launched onto Microsoft Azure Marketplace in open source format, and are proud to be updating the team this ISC 18 on cloud impact in research.
Throughout this journey we’ve remained committed to keeping cloud costs low as users continue to learn the best means to exploit this prospectively ‘infinite’ resource. Alces remains committed to the open source movement, ensuring free single-user subscriptions are available on AWS and Azure, and to engaging and listening to feedback on what works and what doesn’t in cloud HPC. Our strong partnerships with the largest public cloud service providers has given HPC a voice and has allowed us the opportunity to take suggestions from CompBioMed forward. From pricing structures, data collaboration, to utilising resources properly for cost effective simulations, this candid feedback is invaluable to the continued growth towards a more inclusive HPC community.
It is not to say that cloud is the only way, however. The Alces team fully participate in the hybrid HPC movement and, with over ten years of integration and cluster management experience, know that sometimes on premise is the only way forward in some cases. This is a key reason we remain at the table for CompBioMed and its revolutionary projects ranging from pharmaceutical research to the goal of personalised medicine. This research, which touches individual lives and their rights towards privacy, helps to champion improvement in technology – and we are grateful for this. Understanding where and when certain technologies need to be put in place is key to the success of CompBioMed’s research. We’re proud to be a part of this process.
The team at Alces looks forward to continuing our work with the CompBioMed group and to educating and enlightening members on new ways to exploit technology to strive towards better research.
More examples of industrial users:
- Rough Guide to Preparing Software for Exascale - Introduction This Rough Guide is a Crib Sheet for improving the efficiency of parallel software for future supercomputers, and was last updated 17th February, 2023 by g.pringle@epcc.ed.ac.uk. This guide first appeared as an appendix of a CompBioMed deliverable [1]. This guide was then updated and appeared as an appendix for the CoE EXCELERAT deliverable [2].…
- CompBioMed e-Seminar #29 - CompBioMed’s 29th e-seminar took place at on 18 January 2023, titled “OpenMP in the Exascale Era”. Modern supercomputer nodes now contain more than 100 cores, and often several GPUs. This means that the “MPI only” approach to parallel programming is coming under increasing strain and can no longer deliver the maximum performance from the hardware.…
- CompBioMed e-Seminar #28 - CompBioMed’s 28th e-seminar took place on 23 November 2022 and focused on Predicting and preventing bone fractures with HPC. Femur fracture is a catastrophic event for elderly women, resulting in severe impairment of life quality or even death in many cases. One of the major risk factor is osteoporosis, an asymptomatic metabolic disorder that causes…
- CompBioMed Session at VPH2022 - The CompBiomed centre of excellence organised, in collaboration with the VPH Institute, a special session on the The role of exascale computing in computational biomedicine at the VPH2022 conference in Porto (PL) on Friday 9 September 2022. The session included four speakers from our consortium. Mariano Vasquez (BSC) showed concrete examples of how Alya can…
- UCL and Sheffield demystify HPC for Biomedical Researchers – winning praise at SC’20 - More than 350 people attended the virtual presentation at Supercomputing 2020 featuring the work done in remote training in the QIIME2 application by consortia members, UCL and the University of Sheffield. This project, which took place over a 4-month period with a 6-week live course, introduced medical students into HPC. Led by Andrea Townsend-Nicholson of…