Enhancing Energy Production with Exascale HPC Methods

High Performance Computing (HPC) resources have become the key actor for achieving more ambitious challenges in many disciplines. In this step beyond, an explosion on the available parallelism and the use of special purpose processors are crucial. With such a goal, the HPC4E project applies new exascale HPC techniques to energy industry simulations, customizing them if necessary, and going beyond the state-of-the-art in the required HPC exascale simulations for different energy sources. In this paper, a general overview of these methods is presented as well as some specific preliminary results.The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 Programme (2014-2020) under the HPC4E Project (www.hpc4e.eu), grant agreement n° 689772, the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under the CODEC2 project (TIN2015-63562-R), and from the Brazilian Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation through Rede Nacional de Pesquisa (RNP). Computer time on Endeavour cluster is provided by the Intel Corporation, which enabled us to obtain the presented experimental results in uncertainty quantification in seismic imagingPostprint (author's final draft

Construction informatics in Turkey: strategic role of ICT and future research directions

Construction Informatics deals with subjects ranging from strategic management of ICTs to interoperability and information integration in the construction industry. Studies on defining research directions for Construction Informatics have a history over 20 years. The recent studies in the area highlight the priority themes for Construction Informatics research as interoperability, collaboration support, intelligent sites and knowledge sharing. In parallel, today it is widely accepted in the Architecture/Engineering/Construction (AEC) industry that ICT is becoming a strategic asset for any organisation to deliver business improvement and achieve sustainable competitive advantage. However, traditionally the AEC industry has approached investing in ICT with a lack of strategic focus and low level of priority to the business. This paper presents a recent study from Turkey that is focused on two themes. The first theme investigates the strategic role of ICT implementations from an industrial perspective, and explores if organisations within the AEC industry view ICT as a strategic resource for their business practice. The second theme investigates the ‘perspective of academia’ in terms of future research directions of Construction Informatics. The results of the industrial study indicates that ICT is seen as a value-adding resource, but a shift towards the recognition of the importance of ICT in terms of value adding in winning work and achieving strategic competitive advantage is observed. On the other hand, ICT Training is found to be the theme of highest priority from the academia point of view

Construction informatics in Turkey: strategic role of ICT and future research directions

Construction Informatics deals with subjects ranging from strategic management of ICTs to interoperability and information integration in the construction industry. Studies on defining research directions for Construction Informatics have a history over 20 years. The recent studies in the area highlight the priority themes for Construction Informatics research as interoperability, collaboration support, intelligent sites and knowledge sharing. In parallel, today it is widely accepted in the Architecture/Engineering/Construction (AEC) industry that ICT is becoming a strategic asset for any organisation to deliver business improvement and achieve sustainable competitive advantage. However, traditionally the AEC industry has approached investing in ICT with a lack of strategic focus and low level of priority to the business. This paper presents a recent study from Turkey that is focused on two themes. The first theme investigates the strategic role of ICT implementations from an industrial perspective, and explores if organisations within the AEC industry view ICT as a strategic resource for their business practice. The second theme investigates the ‘perspective of academia’ in terms of future research directions of Construction Informatics. The results of the industrial study indicates that ICT is seen as a value-adding resource, but a shift towards the recognition of the importance of ICT in terms of value adding in winning work and achieving strategic competitive advantage is observed. On the other hand, ICT Training is found to be the theme of highest priority from the academia point of view

Collaborative support for distributed design

A number of large integrated projects have been funded by the European Commission within both FP5 and FP6 that have aimed to develop distributed design solutions within the shipbuilding industry. VRShips-ROPAX was funded within FP5 and aimed to develop a platform to support distributed through-life design of a ROPAX (roll-on passenger) ferry. VIRTUE is an FP6 funded project that aims to integrate distributed virtual basins within a platform that allows a holistic Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analysis of a ship to be undertaken. Finally, SAFEDOR is also an FP6 funded project that allows designers to perform distributed Risk-Based Design (RBD) and simulation of different types of vessels. The projects have a number of commonalities: the designers are either organisationally or geographically distributed; a large amount of the design and analysis work requires the use of computers, and the designers are expected to collaborate - sharing design tasks and data. In each case a Virtual Integration Platform (VIP) has been developed, building on and sharing ideas between the projects with the aim of providing collaborative support for distributed design. In each of these projects the University of Strathclyde has been primarily responsible for the development of the associated VIP. This paper describes each project in terms of their differing collaborative support requirements, and discusses the associated VIP in terms of the manner that collaborative support has been provided

Adding Virtual RFID to Second Life

Second Life (SL) is a popular online 3D multi-player virtual world where the limits of creating objects and scripting interactions among objects and avatars are based on the player\u27s imagination and scripting skill. Real life, by comparison, is often limited by current technology more than creativity. This thesis investigates a new way to merge reality and virtual reality, in particular, by modeling one emerging real world technology, radio frequency identification (RFID), in the SL virtual world. We investigate how RFID can be deployed and tested in a virtual world, a modeled healthcare facility, as a step before the much more expensive step of deploying it in a real world setting. RFID is just one of many emerging technologies that can be simulated in SL - others include GPS, smart devices, massive use of sensors, using natural language to talk to devices, and many more. The potential impact of testing these technologies in a simulated world before deploying in the real world could lower costs and accelerate the pace of technology chang

End-to-End QoS Support for a Medical Grid Service Infrastructure

Quality of Service support is an important prerequisite for the adoption of Grid technologies for medical applications. The GEMSS Grid infrastructure addressed this issue by offering end-to-end QoS in the form of explicit timeliness guarantees for compute-intensive medical simulation services. Within GEMSS, parallel applications installed on clusters or other HPC hardware may be exposed as QoS-aware Grid services for which clients may dynamically negotiate QoS constraints with respect to response time and price using Service Level Agreements. The GEMSS infrastructure and middleware is based on standard Web services technology and relies on a reservation based approach to QoS coupled with application specific performance models. In this paper we present an overview of the GEMSS infrastructure, describe the available QoS and security mechanisms, and demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods with a Grid-enabled medical imaging service