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HECToR: UK National Academic Supercomputer Service

NAG provides the Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) Support Service for the UK's national academic supercomputing service, HECToR.

About HECToR HECToR is the UK's national academic supercomputing service, funded by the Research Councils and available for UK academic researchers. HECToR's mission is to provide supercomputers and HPC expertise to enable true capability science. The HECToR service is provided by the HECToR partners, including NAG. Technology watch and procurement support NAG began working with the HECToR team in 2003 by delivering HPC technology advice and HPC market intelligence to the project. Subsequently, NAG was chosen to design and undertake the procurement benchmarking process, which played a significant part in the supercomputer procurement process.

HECToR - a Research Councils UK High End Computing service.

Computational Science and Engineering support

NAG's HECToR CSE Service combines traditional helpdesk based support and training with a "distributed CSE" service, which dedicates significant amounts of effort onto key user applications.

CSE support (or HPC software engineering) is available to all HECToR users. In addition to the typical HPC application support service provided by NAG, users will be able to apply to the NAG distributed CSE team for dedicated support for their project. This support would be for periods of between six months and two years, and is intended to help users port their application code to HECToR and improve the performance, scalability and functionality of these codes. We will publish regular calls for proposals throughout the life of the project. In total, the HECToR CSE service provides around 20 full-time equivalent people per year.

HPC training

NAG also provides a range of HPC training courses to help users of HECToR get the most out of the system. The HPC training programme covers topics ranging from getting started on HECToR to improving parallel application performance and scalability on distributed memory machines. Although aimed mainly at HECToR users, the courses may also be of interest to a wider community. Training courses are held at NAG's offices or at various universities around the UK. Attendance is free for HECToR users and for any other researchers sponsored by one of the research councils EPSRC, NERC or BBSRC.

For more details and to register please visit the HECToR Training webpage.