Dr Violeta Holmes @ Science and Innovation Conference
Mon, 25 Jul 2016 11:57:00 BST
The Science and Innovation Conference 2016 was held on 14th June in the impressive QEII Centre in London. The event featured many leading experts sharing insights and best practice.
Dr Violeta Holmes, HPC Research Group Leader at the University of Huddersfield was a plenary speaker at the conference sharing the platform with Professor Tim Dafforn, Chief Scientific Advisor, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, and Paul Mason, Deputy Director Research and Chief Scientific Advisor, Innovate UK. Dr Holmes, gave a talk on ‘The Importance of HPC in Assisting the Advancement of Innovation within Sciences’.
Over the past 50 years, modelling and simulation have complemented theory and experiment as a key component of the scientific method. To know whether the plane can fly before it is made or to find out the effect of a drug before it is delivered we need High Performance Computers (HPC). Many achievements and benefits have been made possible by remarkable advances in HPC. Dr Holmes presented a summary of UK e-Infrastructure, national and regional HPC resources and some examples of research in engineering, chemistry and material science made possible by HPC systems. She emphasised that national e-Infrastructure for UK research and innovation requires a firm foundation within the Higher Education Institutions (HEI), which are the primary incubators of expertise, implementation and exploitation of HPC. Some industrial collaborations and applications are solely suited to HEI facilities.
Dr Holmes used the 3M Buckley Business and Innovation Centre at Huddersfield as an example of HEI and HPC for industry. She presented case studies in engineering and science from the HPC at the University of Huddersfield. She concluded that the HPC and Big Data are new technologies vital for the advancement in science, business and industry.
