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• October 11, 2022
  After a quiet period, a lot happened over the summer. Todd Jones has taken up a lectureship in our department and will be a core member of the ACES activity. Over the same period Daniel Galea finished his Ph.D and has moved to a post-doctoral position in Lawrence Livermore Lab in the U.S. We’ll share more about Todd’s interests and Daniel’s new job soon.
• September 27, 2021
  Bryan gave gave a presentation at “ESiWACE2 2021 General Assembly” (Gotomeeting). The talk, “WP4 Data at Scale” is available on Bryan’s personal website.
• September 20, 2021
  Bryan gave gave a presentation at “19th Workshop on high performance computing in meteorology” (Zoom). The talk, “Digital Twin Thinking for HPC in Weather and Climate” is available on Bryan’s personal website.
• September 03, 2021
  Bryan gave gave a presentation at “ESCAPE-2 Final Dissemination Workshop” (Zoom). The talk, “ExCALIBUR for ESCAPE” is available on Bryan’s personal website.
• September 02, 2021
  Bryan gave gave 2 presentations at “Benchmarking for ExCALIBUR Update” (Zoom). The talks “From ESiWACE to ExCALIDATA” and “An Introduction to ExCALIDATA” are available on Bryan’s personal website.
• December 02, 2020
  Chris gave an invited presentation titled Automatic Generation of OpenMP for Weather and Climate Applications at the virtual 3rd OpenMP developers and users conference. He also took part in a panel discussion on Key challenges facing OpenMP and HPC developers.
• October 21, 2020
  Bryan gave gave a presentation at “ESIWACE2 Mid-Term Review” (GotoMeeting). The talk, “Data Systems at Scale, Mid-Term Update” is available on Bryan’s personal website.
• September 30, 2020
  Chris attended a virual workshop run by NCAR in Boulder, CO, USA for the 10th annual multicore workshop. He presented a paper on Performance and Scaling of the LFRic model and took part in a panel discussion on Approaches to Effectively Using Accelerators and Multicore Hardware in Production Environments.
• August 24, 2020
  Chris gave a presentation on parallel programming in practice at the online ESiWACE summer school on HPC. His talk title was Scaling algorithms and Coupling models.
• May 15, 2020
  Julian organized for the Open Source Specialist Group the evening Open source software for scientific and parallel computing.
• May 05, 2020
  Bryan gave gave a presentation at “Earthcube - What about Data?” (Boulder via Hangout). The talk, “When (and how) should a simulation be FAIR?” is available on Bryan’s personal website.
• February 01, 2020
  Julian organized for the Special Interest Group of High-Performance I/O in the UK the Workshop on Storage Challenges in the UK at the University of Reading. We had 30 attendees from science and industry.
• November 20, 2019
  Julian attended the Supercomputing conference in Denver. He (co-)organized the BoFs for the the IO-500 and the Virtual Institute of I/O, Analyzing Parallel I/O, and Knowledge Is Power: Unleashing the Potential of Your Archives Through Metadata.
• September 25, 2019
  Chris visited NCAR in Boulder, CO, USA for the 9th annual multicore workshop. He presented a paper on solvers in Atmospheric Models and presented and moderated a panel discussion on 1km global modelling. He then went to Tennessee to visit the the climate change institute at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
• September 12, 2019
  Chris Chris presented a seminar on the LFRic model development to the NCAS Climate Modelling Summer School in Cambridge.
• June 22, 2019
  Julian attended the ISC HPC conference in Frankfurt. He (co-)organized the BoFs for the International HPC Certification Program, the IO-500 and the Virtual Institute of I/O, and Data-Centric Computing for the Next Generation and the workshop HPC I/O in the Data Center Workshop.
• June 18, 2019
  Bryan gave gave a presentation at “The UM User’s Workshop 2019 - Next Generation Modellin Systems” (Exeter). The talk, “Challenges facing the modelling community” is available on Bryan’s personal website.
• June 14, 2019
  Chris and Julian attended the PASC2019 conference in Zurich. Chris made two presentations, on the LFRic DSL, the solver in LFRic and a poster on LFRic. Julian organized the Minisymposium: The Exabyte Data Challenge .
• March 01, 2019
  Bryan gave a seminar in the Meteorology department on the implications for climate modelling of the upcoming supercomputing diversity. Details (and slides) on his personal blog here. (The difference from the last seminar was that this one was implications for climate modellers, the last one was implications and opportunities for computer science. Roughly half the content was in common between the two seminars.)
• February 11, 2019
  Bryan gave a seminar in the department today on supercomputing diversity from a climate modelling perspective. Details (and slides) on his personl blog here.
• January 15, 2019
  Julian organized for the Special Interest Group of High-Performance I/O in the UK the Workshop on Storage Challenges in the UK at the University of Reading. We had 30 attendees from science and industry.
• November 12, 2018
  Supercomputing was a great success for ACES. Julian was organizing the Birds-of-a-feather sessions: The IO-500 and the Virtual Institute for I/O, the HPC Certification Program, and Analyzing I/O. At the IO-500 BoF, we released the new list ranking the performance of storage – the number of submissions has grown more than 2x since June! Julian spoke on five different events delivering the talks: Towards an HPC Certification Program, The Virtual Institute for I/O, The HPC Certification Program, Using Benchmarks to Understand Performance Behavior, Opportunities for Integrating I/O Capabilities with Cylc.
• September 27, 2018
  Julian gave a talk in the ECMWF 18th Workshop on high performance computing in meteorology workshop about “Overcoming Storage Issues of Earth-System Data with Intelligent Storage Systems”.
• September 24, 2018
  
  Over summer we had great news about two of our big European project bids:

  • ESIWACE2 has been funded and will begin in January 2019, and overlap with the end of ESIWACE itself.
  • IS-ENES3 has also been funded, and will also begin in January 2019.

  We will have much more to say about those in the future.
  In other news, Bryan has a new paper out on the requirements needed for the CMIP6 global data infrastructure, and also delivered two significant talks in the last couple of weeks:

  1. At the Hydro-Jules open meeting, on plans to build the Hydro-Jules modelling framework, and
  2. At an Extreme Data workshop in Jülich, on methods of beating data bottlenecks in weather and climate science.
• September 18, 2018
  On a trip to the US, Chris visited Intel Corporation in Silicon valley, presented the paper on LFRic model development at the Multicore 2018 workshop at NCAR in Boulder and visited the climate change institute at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
• September 11, 2018
  Chris gave the opening keynote presentation at the IEEE Cluster 2018 conference on Crossing the chasm in Belfast.
• June 27, 2018
  To ISC-HPC Julian contributed various project posters, a research poster, and the HPC-IODC workshop. Relevant posters are:

  • A user-controlled GGDML Code Translation Technique for Performance Portability of Earth System Models
  • The virtual institute for IO and the IO-500
  • International HPC Certification Program

  He gave various talks about

  • Understanding metadata latencies
  • Cost and performance modeling
  • The virtual institute of IO
  • The community development of next generation of semantic storage interfaces

  See the talks.
• June 27, 2018
  Bryan gave a talk at the 2018 JASMIN User Conference on how JASMIN has been used, and how that has led to the current programme of improvement, and plans for the future.
• June 26, 2018
  Yesterday Bryan gave a talk on climate data issues at the UK Met Office as part of a summer school on data intensive weather and climate science organised by the Mathematics for Planet Earth doctoral training programme.
• June 20, 2018
  SIGHPC Education chapter released a blog entry about the HPC-Certification Forum from Julian; hope to see you during our meeting at ISC.
• June 14, 2018
  Yesterday Bryan was in Brussels representing esiwace and the weather and climate community in establishing requirements for Europe’s massive upcoming investment in HPC - EuroHPC. (EuroHPC aims to deploy pre-exascale computing in 2020 and proceed to exascale computers a few years later.)
• June 09, 2018
  The two award winners for the ISC travel grant have been determined and publicly announced. Julian was part of the selection committee and will mentor them during ISC HPC.
• June 06, 2018
  Julian held a workshop in the department aimed at establishing a UK new special interest group in I/O. With attendees from a range of institutions and companies, it was deemed a success, and future meetings will eventuate. Contact Julian if you are interested in participating next time (or keep an eye on our new events page.)
• June 04, 2018
  The Update of the ENES infrastructure strategy 2012-2022 to which we contributed is now online.
• June 04, 2018
  Chris attend the two-day (Debugging Workshop) at the University of Bath, June 4-5. He gave a presentation entitled “Butterflies, Bugs and Building an Atomospheric model for Exascale computing: Debugging at the bleeding edge”. He describes how the separation of concerns, code generation and testing, testing, testing can help to keep bugs small and easy to discover. All the presentations from the speakers can be found on the workshop webpages. He also contributed a code with a bug that only triggers from some compilers, and took an active part in the lively discusssions.
• May 23, 2018
  Last week Bryan attended a two-day HPC workshop in Lecce, Italy, organised by the ESiWACE project under the auspices of the European Network for Earth System modelling (ENES). This workshop is a biennial event which brings together experts from around the world to discuss frontier computing issues for weather and climate - the focus this year, as recently, was on progress towards exascale computing - projects, hardware, models, and methods of developing models. Bryan organised a panel session on what HPC centres are, and will be, doing to support weather and climate workflows at scale. The abstracts are available at the workshop link above, and the presentations themselves will appear there soon.
• May 08, 2018
  Our paper on how to develop future weather and climate models, in the face of a growing problem with portability, performance, and productivity (also known as “the chasm paper”) has appeared in Geoscientific Model Development, and selected as one of their highlight articles.
• April 18, 2018
  Julian and Nabeeh visited ECMWF. Nabeeh gave a talk regarding to domain-specific language in the AIMES project and collaboration possibilities between ACES and ECMWF have been discussed. Besides joint student projects, a specific topic could be the collaboration in mini-apps to evaluate performance and portability aspects.
• April 17, 2018
  Chris attend the three-day Exascale Applications and Software Conference (EASC2018) at the University of Ediburgh, April 17-19. He presented a paper on “LFRic and PSyclone: Building a Domain Specific Embedded Language for weather and climate models”, attended some interesting talks on meeting the Exascale challenge and chaired a session as well as being a member of the program committee.
• April 11, 2018
  Neil gave a talk on Monday at the EGU General Assembly on our ESIWaCE funded s3NetCDF software tool that has generated some interest in the community.
• March 26, 2018
  Bryan gave a talk at the Alan Turing Institute on data sciences for climate and environment covering challenges for, and examples of, using (modern) data science techniques in Environmental Science (of course we have been using data science forever). Some issues with hardware and software environment were also discussed.
• March 26, 2018
  

  Titan and Summit

  Chris, along with colleagues from the Met Office, visted Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The machine room tour was great to see and stand next to Titan (Ex #1 on top 500 list, current ranking is #5), and their new machine, Summit, still be commissioned. Humungous!
  Read more »
• March 22, 2018
  Our paper on the work of the WCRP Working Group on Climate Modeling (WGCM) Infrastructure Panel (WIP) gives recommendations for the global data infrastructure needed to support CMIP design, future growth and evolution has just appeared in GMD discussions. Please have a look and potentially contribute to the online review/discussion.
• March 21, 2018
  Chris attend a one-day workshop on Quantum Computing workshop at the Julich Forschungszentrum on evaluating quantum computing devices and developing algorithms to exploit them.
• January 02, 2018

  An introduction to the staff of ACES

  There are short staff bios for the staff below. We will add a new staff page with a bit more about the research group at some future time.
  Read more »
• January 01, 2018
  On January the 2nd, 2018, the University of Reading Advanced Computing for Environmental Sciences research group (ACES, pun intended) was borne. This website will gradually take shape over the next few weeks as we bootstrap some content, and new people join us.