Can Scottish Life Sciences Benefit from Local, World-Class High Performance Computing Expertise?

Based at the University of Edinburgh, the EPCC is one of Europe’s premier High Performance Computing (HPC) centres and their on-demand HPC service and research collaborations are targeted at engineers and scientists solving complex simulation and modelling problems.  This includes fields such as BioInformatics, Computational Biology, Computational Chemistry, Computational Fluid Dynamics, Finite Element Analysis, Life Sciences and Earth Sciences.

The EPCC was founded in 1990 and, since its inception, EPCC has acted as a focal point for expertise in high performance and novel computing, and more recently in Data and High Performance Data Analytics (HPDA). EPCC works very closely with Industry, leveraging our three key foundations: The hosting, provision and management of high-performance computing (HPC) and data facilities for academia and business. Research and project support to optimise the computing activities of those organisations and our unique project-based Applications Group, which provides bespoke novel and high-performance software solutions to academia, industry and commerce.

Funded Research Collaborations

Our research collaborations can take many forms and are funded through a variety of mechanisms that includes the European Commission, UK Research Councils and Scottish Enterprise, among others.

A good example of this is EPCC’s involvement in the development of a Centre of Excellence in Computational Biomolecular research, through the BioExcel project. The BioExcel Centre of Excellence supports academia and industry with the use of advanced techniques for high-end computing.

Part of this involves reaching out to possible users of the Centre and ensuring that the centre’s work will reflect the needs and interests of the computational biomolecular research community. As part of this the centre has a set of Interest groups

  • The Integrative Modelling IG
  • The Practical Applications for Industry IG.
  • The Hybrid Methods IG

Code development

Technical work includes the development of a new QM/MM interface for the code CPMD. This will make it easier to conduct simulations which take into account quantum effects to accurately represent how particles are interacting at atomic scale, but which also scale up to systems that are big enough to be of interest in real biological applications. This new interface is currently being evaluated using a real problem in collaboration with the Human Brain Project.

By collaborating with EPCC your organisation can benefit from our world-class HPC research expertise and facilities. If you would like to discuss any aspect of collaborative research please contact our Commercial Manager, Thomas Blyth: t.blyth@epcc.ed.ac.uk

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