PV2018: Global Data-Science Conference
This very successful international conference focused on understanding large datasets and making them usable for societal benefits and commercial growth. It was held at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory from 15-17 May, and hosted by the UK Space Agency and organised by STFC, NCEO and the Satellite Applications Catapult. More than 300 authors from five continents contributed to the programme and talks ranged from pest control in sub-Saharan Africa to the UK transport network. STFC Chief Data Scientist Tony Hey was the Conference Chair and a number of SCD staff either spoke at the conference or presented posters and demonstrations.
JASMIN Conference
JASMIN 2018 was held at the Milton Hill hotel and conference centre and at RAL on 27-28 June. This 3rd annual conference provided an opportunity for some of the 1700 existing users of the super data computer, JASMIN, to share their work and learn about the ways in which JASMIN can continue to support their work.
Jonathan Churchill, JASMIN Systems Architect and Infrastructure Manager for SCD, talked about how his team is addressing the challenges of connecting new hardware for the Phase 4 upgrade.
JASMIN was built and managed by SCD in collaboration with CEDA. The event was organised by CEDA, part of RAL Space. The diverse programme offered plenty of networking opportunities and workshops.
European Open Science Cloud (EOSC)
Juan Bicarregui chaired a session at the EOSC summit on Progress towards the EOSC
The programme included talks from Director Generals from the EC: Jean-Eric Paquet, DG Research and Innovation and Roberto Viola, DG for CNECT.
Two proposals have been submitted that will support the EOSC governance.
ISC 2018 in Frankfurt 24 – 28 June
SCD and the Hartree Centre once again had a strong presence at this event with a display booth and a number of staff attending the technical programme. Hartree Director Alison Kennedy spoke about science as a service and delivering constraint-based computing services to industry. Jack Dongarra, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Tennessee, presented an overview of the NLAFET (Parallel Numerical Linear Algebra for Extreme Scale Systems) Project and included contributions from the SCD team at RAL. Read more about our time at ISC
SCD at other international conferences
Iain Duff represented the Institute of Mathematics and Applications at the International Council for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Board meeting, 9-12 May in Philadelphia. He spoke at the preceding workshop about research done in the NLAFET Project.
Jennifer Scott, Iain Duff and Stojce Nakove from SCD's Computational Maths Group all spoke in sessions at the SIAM Conference on Combinatorial Scientific Computing. This conference, which was held in Bergen, Norway, 6-8 June. Jennifer Scott is also on the scientific programme committee for the conference.
27-29 June, Jennifer Scott, Nick Gould and Tyrone Rees attended the IMA Conference on Numerical Linear Algebra and Optimisation. They organised a mini symposium entitled "Modern methods for least squares fitting". Jennifer and Tyrone both gave research talks.
At the 10th International Workshop on Parallel Matrix Algorithms and Applications, 27-29 June, Florent Lopez presented a talk about work done in the NLAFET Project in the mini-symposium 'Task based programming for scientific computing'.
The Computational Chemistry Group's VIMMP (Virtual Materials Market Place) project team was invited to present at the "Materials Ontology Workshop" in Brussels on 29 June.
CoSeC (Computational Science Centre for Research Communities )
Collaborative Computational Project CCP5 held a Nuclear Materials modelling workshop in Bristol on 4 & 5 June. The event provided an overview of different modelling methodologies at different scales in the nuclear field.
CCP5, in collaboration with CCP-Biosim, held a Molecular Modelling School in Barranquilla, Columbia, from 25-29 June. It was aimed at newcomers to molecular simulations who are or will be using the DL_Software packages developed at the Daresbury Laboratory.
