OIL & GAS

A Scottish industry alliance to build a supercomputer 200 times faster than a normal PC has been unveiled in Edinburgh. The partnership will work on groundbreaking technology capable of processing a teraflop, which could place Scotland at the forefront of supercomputer design. The latest Star Wars movie, Revenge of the Sith, is breaking box office records. While set in a galaxy far away, it was the product of a supercomputer only rivaled by US Space Agency NASA. The vision on the screen is of a world which has unlimited, automated computer resources. It is not entirely fictional if the major initiative comes to fruition. Allan Cantle, president of Nallatech, said: "You can do supercomputing in a much smaller space. And also it reduces power consumption. And it allows you to solve problems that you couldn't solve before." The High Performance Computing Alliance, made up of top academics, Scottish Enterprise, Scottish SME’s and global computing experts will work together to build the supercomputer which is capable of processing one trillion instructions per second. Reconfigurable computing using high performance chips called Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) is a fast growing industry and the aim of the Alliance will be to build a computer capable of combining a large number of these chips to provide faster and cheaper computer processing for use in areas such as life sciences, mobile telecoms and the oil and gas industry. Minister for Enterprise and Lifelong Learning Jim Wallace will today formally launch the Alliance which draws on the specialist knowledge of Scottish companies Alpha Data Parallel Systems, Algotronix and Cumbernauld based Nallatech. Minister for Enterprise, Jim Wallace said: "If the Executive is to achieve its key aim of continuing to grow Scotland's economy we need to encourage effective collaboration between industry and academia, to develop new technological products and to explore new markets. "The High Performance Computing Alliance is an excellent example of this type of successful partnership working - bringing together some of the world's leading computing experts to develop truly groundbreaking technology which will place Scotland at the forefront of microelectronic innovation and design. "The Supercomputer that the Alliance is creating will have far-reaching benefits in areas such as life sciences, climate change and games technology and ultimately generate new knowledge and wealth for Scotland." Significant support will be provided by Xilinx Inc, the global leader in FPGA chip technology who have a European development group located in Edinburgh. The new supercomputer, which will be created through technology and expertise donations by the partners, will be operated by the world renowned supercomputer centre, EPCC, at the University of Edinburgh. Major funding of £1.345 million towards the £3.6 million project will come from Scottish Enterprise. In addition the Alliance will support the Institute for System Level Integration (ISLI) to identify other companies who will benefit from the super computer technology by placing research students to undertake company focused R&D work. Chief Executive of Scottish Enterprise Edinburgh and Lothian, Jim McFarlane said: “This project will position Scotland as a global centre of excellence in the next phase of high performance computing that will exploit emerging market opportunities in areas including oil and gas reservoir mapping, finance data processing and modelling, drug development, weather forecasting, aerospace and film animation. ”The development of high performance computing technology is on the cusp of the most significant advance since large clusters of PC servers replaced giant mainframe computers. “We have brought together the best in world to collaborate on this project that will place us at the forefront of the implementation of a technology whose time has come. It is an exciting programme that will help transform indigenous Scottish companies into major global players of scale in this field, while creating significant added value to the economy.” Director of the Institute for System Level Integration, Tony Harker said: “The Institute is delighted to be participating in this exciting project and to enable applications companies to embrace and take advantage of the technology through our Engineering Doctorate programme. Reconfigurable computing has been a strong interest of ours and we see this as an important technology for the future of system design.” Dr Tom Kean of Algotronix said: “Algotronix is very pleased to contribute its expertise to this project which will help preserve and extend Scotland’s leadership in FPGA based computing technologies.” Patrick Lysaght, Senior Director of Xilinx Research Labs and the Xilinx University Programme said: “As a founding member of the Alliance, Xilinx is very excited to support such an innovative research programme at one of the world’s foremost Universities. Through our partnership with the University of Edinburgh’s EPCC Supercomputer Centre we look forward to seeing the tremendous computing power and intrinsic parallelism of Xilinx FPGA’s used to set new performance benchmarks for supercomputing.” "Nallatech is delighted to realise its vision of bringing together academia, government and industry to form the FPGA High Performance Computing Alliance,” Allan Cantle, Nallatech President and CEO, said. “Scotland has long been at the forefront of FPGA Computing and we are excited to further establish the region as the continuing centre of excellence in the industry.”