Technical computing in the public sector

Professor JC Desplat, Director of the Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC), discusses his experience of public sector partnerships.

Many of our readers may not be familiar with your organisation. Tell us about ICHEC.

ICHEC is Ireland’s national centre for technical computing. It was established in 2005 and we are funded by the Departments of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation (DJEI) and Education and Skills (DES), as well as from industry engagement and competitive EU programmes. The centre is hosted by NUI Galway and has offices in Dublin and Galway.

ICHEC’s mission is concerned with the effective use of computing technologies. One of our core activities is to provide a national High Performance Computing (HPC) service to researchers across the third level sector. Our team consists of 23 technology experts who design software solutions for academia, industry and the public sector. The centre provides Ireland with its national HPC infrastructure but, more importantly, we provide the necessary expertise to use it effectively. We adopt a multi-disciplinary approach that brings together domain experts, technologists, software engineers and project managers. As a result, we have a thriving programme of industry engagement with well-known multi-national corporations such as Intel, Tullow Oil, DataDirect Networks and Xilinx as well as SMEs like NewsWhip.

What does ICHEC bring to public sector organisations?

In a nutshell, ICHEC lowers the technology barriers so that its clients and partners can carry out their business quicker and more effectively. We have found that a partnership engagement model with public sector organisations works very well.

How is ICHEC positioned relative to private sector providers?

We provide mostly pre-competitive solutions and facilitate migration to commercial providers. As a result, we are growing the potential client base of private service providers by accelerating the adoption of ICT technologies. ICHEC has some highly specialised services that would otherwise not be available. As with all activities in ICHEC, the provision of these services is guided by robust processes that ensure compliance with legislation on state aid for R&D and innovation.

What type of work have you done with the public sector to date?

Our first engagement was with Met Éireann (MÉ). It started in late 2006 when they enquired about the feasibility of migrating the computation of their weather prediction model to ICHEC. We offer a unique capability in Ireland and we were eager to demonstrate the impact and relevance of high-end computing beyond academic research. Very quickly, the two teams developed a strong relationship based on competence and trust. This created a positive problem-solving environment and the teams began to collaborate on application-focused challenges.

Forecasting and climate codes are among the largest and most complex, making them challenging to ‘scale up’ to deliver the necessary increase in resolution, faster time to solution and models with improved accuracy. Thus rapidly our engagement acquired a new dimension focused on R&D collaboration, bringing to Ireland the type of synergistic relationships found in large-scale national supercomputing centres such as the Swiss national centre CSCS.

The second, more recent, example involves the Central Statistics Office (CSO). Following informal discussions at the DJEI Big Data and Data Analytics Working Group in 2013, ICHEC held exploratory meetings with CSO. The CSO Director General, Pádraig Dalton, is Chair of the high level group for the Modernisation of Statistical Production and Services – an initiative to modernise statistical systems at national statistical institutions (NSIs) at the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE). CSO recognised the opportunity to make Ireland relevant in this high profile initiative by providing a high quality technology platform to support the work of the participants globally. This required the configuration and operation of infrastructure and value-added services for enablement (i.e. making technology accessible to non-specialists), user support and the design of personalised solutions.

And what have been the benefits?

In terms of benefits, the partnership brought to MÉ:

• access to leading edge technology and expertise;

• the ability to improve the accuracy of forecasting products with resolution increased from 15km in 2007 to only 2.5km in 2013;

• a strengthening of Ireland’s contribution to climate change research via the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (ICHEC’s big data expertise enabled the processing of very large volumes of climate data and publishing that data to over 1,500 climate scientists from 17 countries worldwide); and

• a common technical platform for interaction with Irish academia.

To ICHEC, it led to:

• a strengthening of our operational processes to bring the infrastructure to near-mission critical levels which also benefitted higher education institution (HEI) users of the infrastructure;

• the development of new products with potential applications in the renewable energy sector via current work with Mainstream Renewable Power and Bord na Móna, as well as smart agriculture and smart cities; and

• the creation of 11 HPC support engineer jobs in General Motors through the DES-funded Springboard programme by teaching the skills and knowledge required to operate a near-mission critical service such as the weather forecast.

The benefits derived from the relationship with CSO are not limited to its partners. Through this initiative, Ireland has gained significant visibility as a competent and early adopter of novel technologies, ahead of larger countries. The ‘UNECE sandbox’, as it is now commonly referred to in the statistics community, has gained significant visibility at international statistics conferences and is quoted as an example of best practice. Looking forward, Eurostat has initiated discussions for the establishment of a larger sandbox that may in due course be open to its 28 members.

What services do you provide to the higher education sector?

Well, ICHEC is responsible for providing the national HPC service to all Irish HEIs (over 1,100 researchers from 18 institutions). Similar to other centres around the world, academic researchers apply for time on this national resource.

As well as the national HPC service, ICHEC operates a cluster ‘condominium service’ (also known as the condo). Rather than each university needing to buy and maintain its own compute resources, this service allows them to buy into a larger, more efficient, collective resource. It started with just UCD and NUI Maynooth in 2008, but we now have almost 400 researchers from almost all the Irish universities using the condominium and the scheme continues to grow in popularity.

What is next for ICHEC?

We are just coming into the final year of our preparatory phase for sustainability so my focus is on ensuring that at the end of 2015 everything is in place for ICHEC’s transition to a truly sustainable model. At an operational level, our priorities remain mostly unchanged:

1. that academic researchers continue to have access to a high quality national service;

2. to grow our partnerships with industry; and

3. to formalise our strategy for public sector engagement.

Combining ICHEC’s technical expertise and its partners’ domain expertise offers an opportunity to deliver better services and position Ireland as an early adopter of novel technologies. I am looking forward to strengthening our existing relationship with the CSO and Met Éireann, and initiate new partnerships with others across the public sector. Technology has great potential. Let’s make it work for Ireland.

Professor JC Desplat can be contacted as follows:
Tel: +353 (0)1 524 1608
Email: info@ichec.ie
Web: www.ichec.ie
Twitter: @ichec