Success Stories

Glasgow based Integrated Environmental Solutions (IES) is the world's leading provider of software and consultancy services which make the built environment more energy efficient, reducing overheads and CO2 emissions in projects around the globe. EPCC worked with IES to accelerate the performance of their SunCast product by optimising the software and using parallel programming techniques. The project with EPCC has reduced the time-to-solution for a typical customer with a 4-core laptop from several hours to less than a single hour. In addition, a SunCast calculation that used to take two weeks to run on Windows desktop will now be able to operate on EPCC's 1500-core supercomputer INDY, with the results available in a matter of minutes.

Aberdeen based Prospect, is a leading global provider of engineering design and analysis services to the world's energy sector. The company makes extensive use of computational modelling and has a modest in-house high performance computing (HPC) system on which they run most of their simulations. With their in-house system constrained by lack of memory and number of processors, working with EPCC allowed them to tackle larger, more complex engineering problems and deliver faster results to their clients. By simulating an offshore wind turbine – a difficult simulation too computationally complex to analyse using their existing computing facilities – EPCC enabled Prospect to demonstrate a new capability to its client base thereby expanding the range of services it provides to its customers.

Modern gene sequencing techniques produce huge volumes of data. Fios Genomics, an Edinburgh biotechnology company, use advanced algorithmic approaches to interpret these genetic fingerprints, but were limited in their ability to deal with very large datasets by their in-house codes and resources.

Working with EPCC enabled them to run portions of their code on HECToR, not only vastly speeding up the process but also enabling them to run much larger projects than previously possible. Access to the HECToR service on-demand has removed the need for them to build up their own computational resources.

Partrac is a Glasgow based marine data acquisition business employing the expertise of EPCC and Glasgow University to simulate the flow dynamics within a novel marine instrument developed by the company.

The simulations were produced using HECToR and commercial software and reduced their costs whilst also dramatically speeding up the design process.