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The Hartree centre will be a new 'technology gateway centre' managed
by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) and located on the Daresbury Science and
Innovation Campus (Daresbury SIC). It will continue the Campus'
mission of bringing together science and enterprise in a
collaborative open innovation environment, and will create a
critical mass of capabilities in the area of computational science.
Being based at Daresbury, with STFC a key stakeholder, it will help
address the government's grand challenges, through the STFC's
Futures Programme and will build on the Campus' network ecosystem
of academic research and industrial R&D. It is expected that
the centres will work on 10-12 grand challenge projects at any
point in time. The main underlying mission behind the HPC
facilities is to make impact on the four government's grand
challenges: security, energy, healthcare and climate.
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As part of a wider government investment of over £60 million
into two gateway centres (the other being a detector systems gateway centre),
plans for the Hartree centre include the employment of 200 staff
and a new-build facility on Campus, with the key objective of
bringing people together in an integrated collaborative
environment. The key driver for this is developing computational
modelling capabilities at Daresbury. As part of its 'gateway' ethos
the development team also plans to attract commercial software
developers to use the Campus' computing base, as this level of
computing power will be unique in the UK.
Daresbury has a long history of collaboration with industry.
Blue chip companies have been using its high performance computing
(HPC) facilities to address R&D issues since the 1970s.
Initially, complex computational analysis was used to support
research on synchrotron radiation facilities (experiments on atomic
and molecular physics and quantum processes) but later, as
computers became more powerful, their usage extended to advanced
engineering and environmental modelling. Daresbury Laboratory also
pioneered the development of codes for parallel simulation that
allows modelling a large number of processes simultaneously (e.g.
air flow affecting every square centimetre of an aircraft's
surface).
Daresbury SIC is home to HPCx - the current national academic
supercomputer. The facility, which is able to process 15 trillion
calculations per second, is used to support the entire academic
research base, being involved in large scale collaborative
computational projects.
The origin of the centre's name is the surname of Douglas R.
Hartree, a British scientist, and pioneer of numerical analysis and
its application in physical sciences. Hartree was one of the first
to use high performance computing to solve scientific problems at
the electron level.
Examples of application for HPC.
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Environment - simulating geographical landscape and the
environment's response to local flooding.
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Energy - efficiency of photovoltaics, optimal electronic
structure
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Nuclear - how nuclear power plants will respond to seismic
activity and flooding
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Life sciences - modelling cells, analysing their chemical and
electrical properties with particular reference to pharmaceutical
research (e.g. how to deliver drugs across the cell membrane) and
neuroscience (how the brain responds to stimuli).