The Hartree Centre is a

high performance computing High-performance computing (HPC) uses supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems. Overview HPC integrates systems administration (including network and security knowledge) and parallel programming into a multid ...

data analytics Analytics is the systematic computational analysis of data or statistics. It is used for the discovery, interpretation, and communication of meaningful patterns in data. It also entails applying data patterns toward effective decision-making. It ...

and

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...

(AI) research facility focused on industry-led challenges. It was formed in 2012 at

Daresbury Laboratory Daresbury Laboratory is a scientific research laboratory based at Sci-Tech Daresbury campus near Daresbury in Halton, Cheshire, England. The laboratory began operations in 1962 and was officially opened on 16 June 1967 as the Daresbury Nuclear P ...

on the Sci-Tech Daresbury science and innovation campus in

Cheshire Cheshire ( ) is a ceremonial and historic county in North West England, bordered by Wales to the west, Merseyside and Greater Manchester to the north, Derbyshire to the east, and Staffordshire and Shropshire to the south. Cheshire's county t ...

, UK. The Hartree Centre is part of the

Science and Technology Facilities Council The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) is a United Kingdom government agency that carries out research in science and engineering, and funds UK research in areas including particle physics, nuclear physics, space science and astro ...

(STFC) which itself is part of

United Kingdom Research and Innovation UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) is a non-departmental public body of the Government of the United Kingdom that directs research and innovation funding, funded through the science budget of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Str ...

(UKRI).

Background

The Hartree Centre takes its name from English mathematician and physicist Douglas Rayner Hartree. It was formed in 2012 with £37.5 million government funding for research into

supercomputing A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions ...

. 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 and "to develop technologies such as batteries for mobile phones". In 2014, the centre was allocated an additional £19 million for research into energy efficient computing and

big data Though used sometimes loosely partly because of a lack of formal definition, the interpretation that seems to best describe Big data is the one associated with large body of information that we could not comprehend when used only in smaller am ...

, such as that which will be generated by the

Square Kilometre Array The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is an intergovernmental international radio telescope project being built in Australia (low-frequency) and South Africa (mid-frequency). The combining infrastructure, the Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKA ...

. In the 2014

Autumn Statement The Spring Statement of the British Government, also known as the "mini-budget", is one of the two statements HM Treasury makes each year to Parliament upon publication of economic forecasts, the second taking place the previous year as the Autum ...

, 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 Cognitive computing (CC) refers to technology platforms that, broadly speaking, are based on the scientific disciplines of artificial intelligence and signal processing. These platforms encompass machine learning, reasoning, natural languag ...

and

analytics. This was part of the

Northern Powerhouse The Northern Powerhouse is a proposal to boost economic growth in the North of England by the 2010–15 coalition government and 2015–2016 Conservative government in the United Kingdom, particularly in the " Core Cities" of Hull, Manchester ...

strategy to boost economic growth in the

North of England Northern England, also known as the North of England, the North Country, or simply the North, is the northern area of England. It broadly corresponds to the former borders of Angle Northumbria, the Anglo-Scandinavian Kingdom of Jorvik, and the ...

. In 2014, the Hartree Centre became an official

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...

Parallel Computing Centre. The Hartree Centre is a base for one of the

IBM Research IBM Research is the research and development division for IBM, an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, with operations in over 170 countries. IBM Research is the largest industrial research org ...

teams in the UK and the

University of Liverpool , mottoeng = These days of peace foster learning , established = 1881 – University College Liverpool1884 – affiliated to the federal Victoria Universityhttp://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukla/2004/4 University of Manchester Act 200 ...

Virtual Engineering Centre. According to the Annual Report from 2017-2018, the Hartree Centre was funded with £115.5mm for the financial year ending 31 March 2018.

Technologies

The Hartree Centre hosts a number of supercomputing platforms including: * Scafell Pike, a Bull Sequana X1000 with

Skylake

CPUs A central processing unit (CPU), also called a central processor, main processor or just processor, is the electronic circuitry that executes instructions comprising a computer program. The CPU performs basic arithmetic, logic, controlling, and ...

and Intel

Xeon Phi Xeon Phi was a series of x86 manycore processors designed and made by Intel. It was intended for use in supercomputers, servers, and high-end workstations. Its architecture allowed use of standard programming languages and application program ...

accelerators * Lenovo NeXtScale * Lenovo System x iDataPlex system * JADE, an

Atos Atos is a European multinational information technology (IT) service and consulting company headquartered in Bezons, France and offices worldwide. It specialises in hi-tech transactional services, unified communications, cloud, big data and ...

Bull system using 63

Nvidia Nvidia CorporationOfficially written as NVIDIA and stylized in its logo as VIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA"; formerly stylized as VIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products from the mid 1990s to ...

DGX-1 Nvidia DGX is a line of Nvidia-produced servers and workstations which specialize in using GPGPU to accelerate deep learning applications. The typical design of a DGX system is based upon a rackmount chassis with motherboard that carries high pe ...

* JADE2 Atos Bull Nvidia DGX-1 Max-Q * Atos Quantum Learning Machine * Visual Computing Centre * IBM

POWER8 POWER8 is a family of superscalar multi-core microprocessors based on the Power ISA, announced in August 2013 at the Hot Chips conference. The designs are available for licensing under the OpenPOWER Foundation, which is the first time for s ...

NVLink NVLink is a wire-based serial multi-lane near-range communications link developed by Nvidia. Unlike PCI Express, a device can consist of multiple NVLinks, and devices use mesh networking to communicate instead of a central hub. The protocol was f ...

Tesla P100 Nvidia Tesla was the name of Nvidia's line of products targeted at stream processing or general-purpose graphics processing units (GPGPU), named after pioneering electrical engineer Nikola Tesla. Its products began using GPUs from the G80 ser ...

* IBM POWER8 +

K80 In 2017, Scafell Pike became the first Bull Sequana X1000 to be installed in the UK. The centre also houses a large scale GPFS storage system.

Past Technologies

The Hartree Centre formerly hosted

supercomputer A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second ( FLOPS) instead of million instructions ...

Blue Joule, an IBM

Blue Gene/Q Blue Gene is an IBM project aimed at designing supercomputers that can reach operating speeds in the petaFLOPS (PFLOPS) range, with low power consumption. The project created three generations of supercomputers, Blue Gene/L, Blue Gene/P, ...

. In June 2012, the year of its installation at

, the

TOP500 The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computing, distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these ...

project ranked Blue Joule as the most powerful non-distributed computing system in the UK and 13th in the world. In 2016, Blue Joule was upcycled into the DiRAC facility at the

Institute for Computational Cosmology The Institute for Computational Cosmology (ICC) is a Research Institute at Durham University, England. It was founded in November 2002 as part of the Ogden Centre for Fundamental Physics, which also includes the Institute for Particle Physics Phe ...

Durham University , mottoeng = Her foundations are upon the holy hills (Psalm 87:1) , established = (university status) , type = Public , academic_staff = 1,830 (2020) , administrative_staff = 2,640 (2018/19) , chancellor = Sir Thomas Allen , vice_chan ...

. Hartree has hosted experimental technologies such as a Maxeler FPGA system, an

ARM In human anatomy, the arm refers to the upper limb in common usage, although academically the term specifically means the upper arm between the glenohumeral joint (shoulder joint) and the elbow joint. The distal part of the upper limb between th ...

64-bit platform, and a ClusterVision-built novel cooling demonstrator using mineral oil.

Energy Efficient Computing

In 2012, the centre was awarded government funding to strengthen UK competitiveness in areas including

and energy efficient computing. Energy efficient computing is becoming an influential research topic for the future

sustainability Specific definitions of sustainability are difficult to agree on and have varied in the literature and over time. The concept of sustainability can be used to guide decisions at the global, national, and individual levels (e.g. sustainable livi ...

of high performance computing, 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 Lenovo Group Limited, often shortened to Lenovo ( , ), is a Chinese Multinational corporation, multinational technology company specializing in designing, manufacturing, and marketing consumer electronics, Personal computer, personal computers, ...

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.

Notable Projects

* As of 2013, the Hartree Centre had a long-term partnership with

Unilever Unilever plc is a British multinational consumer goods company with headquarters in London, England. Unilever products include food, condiments, bottled water, baby food, soft drink, ice cream, instant coffee, cleaning agents, energy drink, t ...

to develop their R&D processes and make better use of high performance computing, specifically computer aided formulation. One of the research projects undertaken resulted in an “app” that focuses on ease of use to put complex supercomputing tools in the hands of chemists. The tool is claimed to enable product experimentation that would previously take a week to be carried out in 40 minutes. * In 2014 the centre ran a competition in partnership with the

Open Data Institute The Open Data Institute (ODI) is a non-profit private company limited by guarantee, based in the United Kingdom. Founded by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Sir Nigel Shadbolt in 2012, the ODI’s mission is to connect, equip and inspire people around th ...

and IBM. Entrepreneurs were allowed to submit their concepts to use publicly available open data for commercial applications. The winning ideas were given time on the Hartree Centre machines with IBM data scientists to prove their concept was commercially viable. One winning company, UK SME Democrata, has created a tool through the project, which analyses and maps open data from a variety of archaeological, geological and land based sources to help large construction and infrastructure companies and projects to predict risk and avoid disturbing sites of historical significance. The tool uses two components of

IBM Watson IBM Watson is a question-answering computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language, developed in IBM's DeepQA project by a research team led by principal investigator David Ferrucci. Watson was named after IBM's founder ...

and

Hadoop Apache Hadoop () is a collection of open-source software utilities that facilitates using a network of many computers to solve problems involving massive amounts of data and computation. It provides a software framework for distributed storage an ...

data repositories. * In June 2015, Minister for Universities and Science

Jo Johnson Joseph Edmund Johnson, Baron Johnson of Marylebone, (born 23 December 1971) is a British politician who was Minister of State for Universities, Science, Research and Innovation from July to September 2019, as well as previously from 2015 to 2 ...

announced a renewed partnership between the Hartree Centre and IBM which provides the centre with access to £200 million worth of IBM's data-centric and cognitive computing technologies and expertise, including

. * In May 2016, the Hartree Centre announced a collaboration with

Alder Hey Children's Hospital Alder Hey Children's Hospital is a children's hospital and NHS foundation trust in West Derby, Liverpool, England. It is one of the largest children's hospitals in the United Kingdom, and one of several specialist hospitals within the Liverpool ...

to create the UK's first "cognitive hospital", using the IBM Watson cognitive computing platform to improve the patient journey and experience. The project won "Most Innovative Collaboration" at the North West Coast Research and Innovation Awards 2017. The ''Alder Play'' app was launched and made available to the public in December 2017, featuring the ''Ask Oli'' chat feature in beta. * From 2016 to 2019 the centre was one of five partners in the LCR 4.0 project to accelerate Industry 4.0 technologies into SMEs in the

Liverpool City Region The Liverpool City Region is a combined authority region of England, centred on Liverpool, incorporating the local authority district boroughs of Halton, Knowsley, Sefton, St Helens, and Wirral. The region is in the historic counties of ...

. The project's success was recognised locallyhttps://www.businesscloud.co.uk/news/lcr-40-to-generate-31m-and-955-jobs and nationally and named by the

Financial Times The ''Financial Times'' (''FT'') is a British daily newspaper printed in broadsheet and published digitally that focuses on business and economic current affairs. Based in London, England, the paper is owned by a Japanese holding company, Nik ...

as one of Europe's 100 Digital Champions. * In June 2019, the Industrial Digitalisation Accelerator was launched, a collaboration with

Siemens Siemens AG ( ) is a German multinational conglomerate corporation and the largest industrial manufacturing company in Europe headquartered in Munich with branch offices abroad. The principal divisions of the corporation are ''Industry'', '' ...

and

enabling businesses to access, explore and integrate Industry 4.0 technologies in a low-risk environment.

External links

The Hartree Centre

References

{{authority control Computer science institutes in the United Kingdom Information technology organisations based in the United Kingdom Research institutes in Cheshire Science and Technology Facilities Council Supercomputer sites