LIV.INNO students visit the STFC Hartree Centre: a glimpse into how advanced technological prowess is shaping the future
A group of LIV.INNO students recently visited the Hartree Centre at STFC’s Daresbury Laboratory. The Hartree Centre is known for helping businesses and organisations to address critical challenges with advanced technological capabilities like supercomputing, data science and artificial intelligence. The central focus of LIV.INNO is to address the challenges of data intensive research areas of science. This visit was a natural fit for the students’ learning and training goals.
The Hartree Centre hosts many supercomputing platforms. A virtual tour of some of these infrastructures helped them to comprehend the enormity of computing power and appreciate the elegance of engineering and architecture. The high-performance computing capabilities at the Centre are constantly upgraded to take up modern challenges. The construction and procurement for an upcoming £30M supercomputing facility has recently started.
Some case studies of how the Centre helps industry and academia to innovate were presented. These included a Virtual wind tunnel for a Road-Legal Supercar, Data Insight from Text Mining Medical Papers, a real-time multi robot routing for Ocado’s Warehouse, 3D Realtime visualization of the Lake District and UKAEA-Farscape, which accelerates fusion energy research using advanced computing.
Through these various presentations, the students got a glimpse of breadth and depth of exploration at the Hartree Centre in HPC, Data Science, AI (Artificial Intelligence), Visualization and other emerging technologies. A presentation by the Business Transformation team threw light on how they use this state-of-the-art facility to co-create value for businesses and other organisations.
Overall, it was an insightful journey of how the talented people at the Hartree Centre in collaboration with academia and industry leverage high-performance computing capabilities to solve challenging problems. The centre continues to help UK businesses and organizations to innovate, to increase productivity and achieve economic growth. UK businesses looking to adopt these advanced technologies can connect with the Hartree Centre and students with entrepreneurial dreams can look forward to leverage from the collaboration. There are also good internship opportunities available for students. The visit concluded with a healthy discussion with technology experts and business development professionals from the Hartree Centre.
Visualisation of the aerodynamic flow around the supercar in virtual wind tunnel