High End Computing Supporting Industry
The exponential growth in data sets requires the application of increasingly complex, large-scale and multi-disciplinary techniques combined with more powerful computers to extract important trends and characteristics.
With its in-house expertise spanning a wide range of disciplines, Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC) staff are providing high-performance solutions to tackle complexity in data-intensive areas from finance to meteorology to nanotechnology.
ICHEC has a particular focus on the use of graphics processors, GPGPUs, to achieve huge performance gains over conventional compute clusters and is applying these novel resources to tackle compute-intensive problems such as: seismic surveys of oil fields; the analysis of cholesterol crystal structures in human gallstones; the acceleration of fundamental computations used in phylogenetics and comparative genomics; and very high resolution regional forecasting for predicting extreme weather. The world-leader in graphics processor technologies, NVIDIA, has acknowledged ICHEC as an enabling partner and in recognition of its GPU expertise designated it as a CUDA Research Centre.
Pictured above - JC Desplat, Associate Director at ICHEC, show a demonstration of the Harmonie model using a 3D visualisation to Mr Sean Sherlock, TD, Minister of State with responsiblity for Research & Innovation.
The Harmonie model is used by many Northern European MET organisations including Spain, Finland, the Netherlands as well as Ireland. The ICHEC visualisations highlight the improvements to forecasting by moving to a finer grain resolution. High resolutions allow for extreme events such as high winds or heavy rain downpours to be more easily detected in advance.
ICHEC are working in conjunction with MET Éireann to optimise and research various aspects of this model. Harmonie is a weather code based on HIRLAM and ALADIN. ALADIN is a spectral limited-area model developed at Meteo-France based on the ARPEGE/IFS model, and HARMONIE uses a combination of ALADINs non-hydrostatic dynamics and HIRLAM physics to create mesoscale model with a horizontal grid-scale of 2.5km. Harmonie is currently under evaluation as a next-generation replacement for HIRLAM, and is run daily at ICHEC for the MET Éireann operational weather forecast.
ICHEC staff are working with a number of Irish companies to provide solutions to their business strategies. These include Tullow Oil, Paddy Power, CarTrawler, ezetop along with several others.
