// Archives

Accelerating the University’s research ambitions with a more powerful HPC service

The University’s High Performance Computing (HPC) service is a research facility available to academic staff and research students, from any School or Faculty, who have the need for computing resource substantially greater than a standard PC. Enabling research that changes the world As one of the UK’s leading research universities, UoN is renowned for the …

Using Julia on the HPC

In this blog, we explore the speed and efficiency of using the programming language Julia on the University’s high-performance computer. This blog has been guest-authored by Jamie Mair, a PhD researcher in the School of Physics and Astronomy. The repository for the code given below, which was presented at this year’s annual UoN HPC conference, …

Going Greener Digitally with Enzymes 

Nature is the Best Chemist Nature is the best synthetic chemist, capable of manufacturing chemicals in an energy-efficient manner and with biodegradable by-products. Millions of years of evolution have explored and optimized reaction pathways, and we would be foolish not to exploit that chemistry. Critical to this efficiency are enzymes – biological catalysts – that are not consumed by …

From Subsystem to Super System – Windows Subsystem for Linux, a Gateway to HPC

If you are seeking to leverage the full extent of computational resources for your research, you are likely to end up using a Unix machine to run your software. This is especially true if you are developing software and data analysis pipelines on High-Performance Computing (HPC) facilities, like Augusta – our own HPC facility at …

High Performance Computing via a Windows interface

In this post, we look at how the University has been testing a Windows interface to its High Performance Computer As data sets become larger and more complex, there is a greater need for more computing power. The University’s High Performance Computer (HPC) allows researchers to distribute their processing, simulations, and computation across hundreds of …

Simulating drug-induced changes in an easy to deploy software service

Containerising and scaling applications using Kubernetes and Azure Dr Gary Mirams is a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow and member of the Centre for Mathematical Medicine & Biology (CMMB) in the School of Mathematical Sciences, where he constructs mathematical and computational models to describe biological processes. Mathematical models offer a way to describe the evolution …

Locating Ancient Trees

Mapping ancient trees using high performance computing Ancient trees are ecologically, historically and culturally important, and although we know the locations of many, there are plenty more to be discovered. Victoria Nolan, a PhD candidate at the University of Nottingham is using mathematical models to produce predictions of likely suitable areas for ancient trees allowing …

Computing Chemistry, Modelling Molecules

When Ellen Guest was struggling with A Level Chemistry, her teacher suggested she drop the course altogether. And yet she persisted. Fast forward a few years and Ellen has an MSci in Chemistry and is Chemistry PhD candidate conducting important drug discovery research. You might assume this type of work is conducted in a traditional chemistry lab, …

Development of a computational platform to support the use of Genome Wide Association Studies

Post by Dr. Philip Quinlan, Advanced Data Analysis Centre (ADAC) The Advanced Data Analysis Centre (ADAC) provides world-leading data analysis expertise, and can assist in developing analytical processes and pipelines. We are currently working in conjunction with the ‘Crops for the Future’ Research Centre at the University of Nottingham’s Malaysia Campus to develop a computational platform to …

Working toward the provision of cloud compute services

The digital research team are actively working with Information Services to provide access to appropriate cloud services for the University. As a part of trialling a new Research Software Engineering service in the School of Geography, it quickly became clear to us the need to secure access to the cloud. This was driven by (1) …