Quantum Meets HPC: Quantum computing is the future, but HPC is here to stay.

Stefano Mensa is a HPC Applications Specialist at the Hartree Centre and a quantum computing enthusiast. We caught up with him after the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) 2022 to talk about his perspective on the role of quantum computing and what this means for the world of high performance computing (HPC). 

ISC 2022 focuses on critical developments in HPC machine learning and high-performance data analytics. This year the conference saw a noticeable shift towards the exploration of quantum computing, with an emphasis on successful applications in science, commerce, and engineering.  

Hello Stefano, welcome back from ISC! This year there were 15 sessions dedicated to the opportunities and challenges associated with quantum computing. What do you think this means for the future of HPC? 

First, the good news: HPC is alive and well and it’s here to stay. So, no one of us is going to be out of the game anytime soon. A lot of things are going on in the field, both with respect to new hardware, software and applications.

In general, there is a commitment in reducing the environmental impact of HPC and new solutions are being developed towards the reduction of power consumption of chips, efficient cooling of HPC systems and energy-efficient workload scheduling. Also gaining momentum in HPC is digital twinning, which virtually represents a physical asset along with the real-time data related to it. This is nice to see as the Hartree Centre has been working on this for a while now, so we are well equipped to take on challenges in this area.

We are home to experts in this field, with a visualisation team and state-of-the-art visualisation facilities to model digital twin assets and related data. An example of digital twinning, our team has developed our virtual wind tunnel, that companies can use to explore fluid dynamics/aerodynamics of digital assets like cars. For more about how digital twinning works you can contact our visualisation team.  

For those who are still getting to grips with quantum computing, can you define it in an accessible way for us? And can you explain how it differs from HPC? 

Quantum computing is a rapidly emerging technology that exploits the laws of quantum mechanics to solve problems that are too complex for classical computing. HPC facilities are the state-of-the-art classical computers and are used to solve very large real-world scientific problems. They use thousands of computers that are connected together to work towards the solution of a single problem. In some cases, the complexity of the problem is so big that sheer classical computational power is not sufficient to provide a solution, as some problems would still take too long to be solved. However, quantum computing leverages the laws of quantum mechanics, and allows computational scientists to explore these complex problems under a different perspective. 

A table comparing some of the differences between quantum computing and supercomputing.
A table comparing some of the differences between quantum computing and supercomputing.

The consensus seems to be that quantum is the future of computing, but you are saying that HPC is “alive and well and here to stay” how do you see these two areas working in conjunction moving forwards? 

Quantum needs HPC and vice-versa. Basically, with the current state of play in the field of quantum computing it is impossible to solve a task entirely on a quantum computer. This will be probably true for a long time.  

There is wide-spread acknowledgment in the community that quantum processors must be considered as “accelerators,” and the remaining part of a hardcore simulation would still be performed on classical HPC. 

This is great, however, it opens a whole new can of worms that you need to consider, like how to couple the quantum processing unit to a HPC platform or the requirements of the data transfer process and runtime.  

Currently, HPC centres across the world are securing real Quantum Hardware and Quantum simulators. In Germany, Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ), has secured a 20 qubits system from IQM. Meanwhile in Japan, the University of Tokyo has secured a quantum machine from IBM, and scaled up to 53 qubits. Both computers are using superconducting chips, furthermore according to an Atos study, 76% HPC centres plan to get into quantum in the near future, and 71% will invest in on-premise infrastructures.  

You were part of the workshop on Quantum and Hybrid Quantum-Classical Computing Approaches that the Hartree Centre co-organised at ISC. From the workshop and the talks across the conference what would you say are some of the challenges facing quantum moving forwards? 

The first big hurdle for widespread adoption of quantum computing in industry is funding. Quantum hardware costs tens of millions of pounds. It is already difficult for government-funded or academic supercomputing centres to acquire funding for HPC procurement, as such, quantum hardware presents a bigger challenge, even more so for industry. To justify the expenditure, you need to demonstrate the impact and benefits it will bring. You can do that by working with organisations like the Hartree Centre, to develop proof-of-concept applications to solve real-world challenges and test them out on real quantum hardware. 

Another hurdle to widespread adoption of quantum is access to skilled staff, especially quantum software engineers. At the Hartree Centre we have staff exploring quantum technology and industry applications to help organisations to access it, and navigate its possibilities, to discover the next step for their businesses. 

Finally, and the most important in my opinion – as it is my field of work! – how do you integrate a quantum processing unit into a HPC facility? Since ISC it feels clear to me that this is where the big effort from HPC centres is going to be placed. This is an ambitious technical end-point for the scientific computing community. Currently, scientific communities mainly access quantum hardware via cloud interfaces and only a handful of facilities in the world have access to actual quantum computers on premise. The aim is to have a seamless integration of quantum hardware inside classical resources, such as a HPC compute node, to increase the computing power and efficiency. 

From what you are describing there are still some steps until we reach the widespread use of quantum computing. What would you say are some of the priorities for organisations to address right now? 

Obviously, we are at the infancy of an emerging technology. There are no standards yet for best practice in quantum computing, and each vendor is developing their own application programming interface and software development kit (SDK), as such there are no fixed rules. However, it looks like some SDKs are going to be long lived. Given that useful large quantum computing architectures are still far in the future, the need for reliable quantum simulators such as the Atos Quantum Learning Machine are more important than ever. Ultimately, the challenge is to develop emulators that accurately simulate physical systems, a sort of digital twin of a quantum computer.  

These points and challenges were discussed across talks at ISC22 and our workshop. Adopting quantum is not going to be an easy road but if you are as excited about quantum I am, then I am confident we can tackle these challenges with enthusiasm and progress this exciting emerging technology.

If you would like to learn more about quantum computing and its applications, please visit our website. If you are interested in collaborating with the Hartree Centre on a project, please contact us.

Staying curious: Reflections on six years as the Hartree Centre Director

As the longest serving Director of the Hartree Centre, Alison Kennedy has taken the Hartree Centre from strength to strength during her six years of leadership. In 2021, she led the team to successfully secure over £200 million of government funding to run the Hartree National Centre for Digital Innovation (HNCDI) programme, applying advanced digital technologies such as high performance computing, data analytics and AI to enhance productivity in the UK industry.

On Alison’s departure, we asked her to share some of her thoughts and experiences advancing the industry application of digital technologies and look forward to what the future might hold.

Where are we now?

This year, 2022, marks the ten year anniversary of the Hartree Centre. It’s an interesting year for us, seeing how far we’ve come, and for me particularly it marks a transition in my career as I move on from my Directorship of the Hartree Centre.

The Hartree Centre had 12 staff when I started, and now we have a team of over 110 people and growing. We’re in a strong position as a department of STFC’s National Laboratories but we’ve had to work hard to transition from being dependent on funding from a series of fixed-term projects to becoming a sustainable entity with a distinct role in the UKRI landscape. Our current status reflects a recognition and appreciation of  the value of our work at the intersection of HPC research, business networks and national and regional government infrastructure. Being at that intersection is what makes us unique and what makes us strong.

“The practical application of science is fundamental to its value.”

 The importance of the Hartree Centre, a department specifically dedicated to supporting businesses and public sector organisations to adopt and apply new digital technologies cannot be overstated. We allow organisations to experiment and learn in a safe environment to ensure they know what technology works for them before they fully invest in it – de-risking that process of exploration. We’re flexible in our approach to emerging technologies – even beginning to investigate the potential of quantum computing for industry in collaboration with the National Quantum Computing Centre (NQCC). But what makes us unique and what really matters to us is that we work very closely with businesses, technology partners and the public sector to ensure that solutions and applications we develop are useful and usable.

Embracing change

One of the things that’s difficult to immediately grasp is that when the Hartree Centre was founded, the notion that high performance computing could be adopted and being used by industry in a whole range of areas was really novel and exciting. Supercomputers were primarily a tool for scientific research, and they were portrayed as being very expensive, very difficult to use, and suitable only for a adoption by a small minority of scientists with long experience in difficult computing simulation and modelling problems.

So for the Hartree Centre, one of the key motivators for us has been the challenge of “democratisation” of high-end novel technology.  How can we make it much more accessible to a much wider range of people? How can we understand what some of these industrial challenges are so we can apply it effectively?

Alison Kennedy taking part in a panel session at STFC’s Digital Tech Cluster launch event.

In the last decade, the world has moved forward in immeasurable ways. We’ve seen profound changes in both the technologies and the language we use to describe them. When I started working at the Hartree Centre, we talked about cognitive computing – now the world is more comfortable with terms like artificial intelligence and AI being used in the workplace. These technologies are no longer the preserve of science fiction and people have learned and begun to accept that these technologies don’t mean fewer jobs – just that everyone’s job spec will change.

“I think that the best piece of advice I’d give to anyone at the start of their career is to stay curious and be adaptable.”

When I look back at the changes in technologies and opportunities over the past 40 years, I’d say it’s very, very unlikely that if you work in technology, that you’ll be doing a similar job in five, ten, fifteen or twenty years’ time. Many of the jobs that we are now recruiting for at the Hartree Centre really didn’t exist in their current form five or ten years ago. If you can stay adaptable, and think about where the technology is going and how you can apply it in other areas, you’ll be set to succeed. Think about what you are interested in, think about what skills you can develop, be enthusiastic, be open to learning new ideas and you will then definitely be part of the solution.

Making digital technologies work for businesses

I think one of the first things we realised early on working with businesses is that it is easy for people who are excited by technology to engage with people in industry who are excited by technology.

However, if you want that technology to be adopted and to be used, then you need to engage the hearts and minds of a whole range of people who are working in industry, from their funders and executives to their customers and their supply chains.

“It’s not just about having a good technology solution. It’s about ensuring that the people you work with understand the power of digital transformation and how adopting digital solutions will benefit their businesses.”

Our projects are not about somebody coming in and doing something for a company using our “super technology powers”. We build multi-skilled teams with professional project management that work collaboratively with our partners so that we can get the best results for them. By talking to our teams and answering their questions, the company is part of the project development not just the “end user”.

Hear more from Alison Kennedy in her recent interview with Cambium LLP.

Acknowledging the power of diverse, multidisciplinary teams

I’ve always thought it’s important that our technology teams reflect society at large. If we’re going to effectively tackle a whole range of challenges, from environmental to societal to economic, then we need to have people who understand what these challenges are who come from a variety of backgrounds and who reflect our society.

Also, from a practical point of view, the areas that we are working in – Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) – have a shortage of applicants. There’s not enough people in the UK with these skills to meet the demand in research and industry sectors. We need to be as open as possible to say: “What’s absolutely essential for this job vs. what can we teach people when they get here?” I’m really pleased that over the years I’ve been at the Hartree Centre, we’ve developed into a more diverse team of people working on our projects – I think this has really benefited us in terms of being able to understand and contribute to some of the challenges that we’re working with – but there’s still a way to go.

Alison Kennedy with Hartree Centre staff at Supercomputing 2019 in Denver, Colorado.

I’m also interested in the way we are moving beyond thinking just about STEM skills in the UK – I’ve noticed more of a focus to add the arts into that mix. It’s important that we are able to illustrate to people in industry and government what the possibilities are. We need to be creative to make it as easy as possible for them to understand what the results of a particular project might be. So, when we look to recruit new team members at the Hartree Centre, we are not just looking for people who have good technical skills. We are also looking for people who are good communicators, who can manage projects to high standards, who have an interest in challenges and who understand the impact of solving them. Our people don’t just want to develop very deep expertise in one area.

To this end, we also have people on our team in the Hartree Centre who have an understanding of digital communications and social media who can interpret our work in a more creative way to engage with different audiences, as well as people who work on the data visualisation side of things. One of our big investments at the Hartree Centre has been a visualisation suite, where we can bring the results of many of our projects to life in a really visual way. We know that for the vast majority of people, this makes it much easier to understand than looking at statistics and formulae.

We use everything from infographics to advanced visualisation to films about our work, anything which helps to convey the power of these new technologies and to spark interest in people to inspire them.

“We want people to think: Wow, that’s really great! I wonder if these technologies could be applied to my particular problem.”

Looking forward, I think there’s a huge amount to be excited about. We’re seeing new applications of existing technologies in an increasing number of areas, alongside the advent of emerging technologies like quantum computing, which is radically different from traditional computing and will enable us to look at problems that cannot be solved on current mainstream computers.

From developing more personalised medicine and healthcare treatments to applying AI in conjunction with simulation and modelling to speed up the refinement of an aeroplane wing design, we have truly only touched the tip of the iceberg. And I for one am excited to see what the Hartree Centre does next!

Alison will be succeeded by Professor Katherine Royse in April 2022.

Building a Climate Resilience Demonstrator

How can digital twins help us respond to climate change? We asked Hartree Centre Data Engineering Specialist and Technical Architect on the Climate Resilience Demonstrator project, Tom Collingwood, to tell us more. 

With all the recent storms causing damage and flooding across the UK, it couldn’t be a more relevant time to talk about climate change!

To start us off, can you explain to us what climate resilience means?

It is very topical right now with all the storms we’d had recently and it seems to be a developing issue that is worth looking at. Most people will be familiar with the idea of climate change causing all kinds of disruption – from flooding to droughts to storm damage. On the extreme end of the scale, they can pose a threat to our safety whether directly or indirectly by disrupting an essential service or system – for example, the power going out in a hospital, or emergency services losing signal on their way to an accident.

This kind of work is distinct from trying to slow/stop climate change – which is incredibly important too – instead, we’re trying to help inform the understanding around what might happen to our infrastructure if/when more severe climate events do occur, and hence how we might prioritise resilience planning around assets which are crucial to whole-of-system resilience.

This means there is huge potential in terms of damage prevention, cost savings and service reliability for immediate services like telecoms, energy, water and utilities – but these also cascade down to any industry that relies heavily on or would be affected by disruption to those services. Which is pretty much all industries!

So that’s where the Climate Resilience Demonstrator (CReDo) comes in?

The Climate Resilience Demonstrator, CReDo, is a digital twin demonstrator project to improve climate and extreme weather resilience across infrastructure networks – the first of its kind in the UK. We narrowed down our focus to look specifically at the effects of extreme flooding on the communications, power and water networks in a specific area of the UK. We have developed a prototype digital twin that takes in data from climate, water, utilities, telecoms and energy industries and applies flood impact models which predict where flooding will form in the UK, how those floods might affect the equipment they touch and how knock-on impacts spread out to the rest of the networks outside the immediate flood zones.

We wanted to demonstrate how those who own and operate infrastructure can use secure, resilient, information sharing, across sector boundaries, to mitigate the effect of flooding on network performance and service delivery to customers, so we’ve been developing reliable approaches and frameworks for secure data sharing and information management that can inform this kind of model and be scaled up.

Why is a digital twin useful when tackling the challenge of climate resilience?

Lots of niche areas of utilities and telecoms will have specific experts or teams who have been responsible for that same machine or equipment for the last 50 years and if you lose that person or team – all that operational knowledge goes with them. If you start using digital twins and connected data, you need to get that specialist information out of their head and turn it into models that can run in AI and machine learning systems, providing 24 hour access to that information.

Many people think of digital twins as operational tools streaming live data from sensors and adjusting ongoing processes accordingly, such as in a manufacturing facility. With climate change, the feedback loop we are looking at might take 100 years to complete, so in this specific use case our digital twin isn’t streaming live data and instead is operating in a way which provides resilience planners with predicted outcomes for a given set of inputs, so they can use the information when making decisions about the future networks they’re supporting. We’re only scraping the surface of what digital twins can do for climate resilience with this specific use case. Bringing operational sensor data into the mix (from river levels to real-time asset monitoring) would broaden the application out to explore current and potentially upcoming failures via predictive maintenance modelling, or branching out into other climatic effects such as wind and extreme heat to inform how we make the whole network more resilient to a variety of new challenges over the coming decades. You’re building the foundations for a digital decision support, and potentially future decision-making, assistant that always gives consistent advice to actively support the experts making vitally important decisions about our countries’ infrastructure.

“That’s the thing – if you get this kind of work right, basically no one will ever hear about it. Life goes on as normal, the power stays on, the communications don’t go down and the damage is minimal.”

Tom Collingwood – CReDo Technical Architect

How do you teach a computer to do that?

You have a structured conversation with the experts, you ask them to tell you how things might break – even in strange or temperamental ways you wouldn’t expect – and you incorporate all those cases to develop a model that provides more accurate predictions. The more you know, the more data you have to keep running through the system to refine it and make better decisions and better decisions in future.

Can you talk us through an example to illustrate what kind of scenarios you’re modelling?

One of the examples we looked at was a water pumping station. So we had to factor in variables like knowing what will break if the water reaches a specific depth because that would submerge the electronics and potentially start a fire. Or if the fuel has been stolen from a backup generator, which will mean everything switches off in an emergency – but imagine cases where there are no sensors detecting whether the fuel is still there.

Our approach means that in the short-term we look at the statistical probability and frequency of those factors to make more accurate predictions of when and how failures might occur. In the long term we’ve discovered what data would be useful so you can put the technologies in place – in this case, you’d install fuel level sensors in the tanks.

So the process goes something like this:

  • Learn from experts what variables affect potential failures or faults
  • Make a plan for which data you need to start collecting
  • Create a model that uses that data to make predictions, and provides sensible approximations where the data aren’t readily available to the system yet
  • Keep feeding in new data to refine the models over time
  • Review the outputs of the models with the experts running the machines/assets, and tweak as necessary to ensure the models give sensible outputs using the current information at hand
  • Use the predicted outputs to inform plans to mitigate the failures

So with the flooding example, you can’t stop the weather but you can predict when it’s likely to happen and put up defences in time to minimise damage or disruption?

Exactly. And the next stage is to look at what knock-on effects happen when a fault or failure occurs – so if it’s a power plant that went down, everything it supplies power to has now lost its primary power supply. What would that mean for vital infrastructure, like healthcare? This was what the short film we funded through the project was exploring – that something like loss of power – even over a short period – can actually be life or death.

The ultimate impact of a single asset going down isn’t something which is immediately apparent – we have to cascade those failures across multiple networks throughout the system if we want to understand the real impact, and with complex network interdependencies that’s not an easy thing for humans to resolve quickly, whereas the right computational models can be very well suited to doing this quickly and repeatably.

Short film “Tomorrow Today” was produced by the National Digital Twin programme and Climate Resilience Demonstrator to explore the potential impact of digital twins.

What was the Hartree Centre’s role in the project?

The Hartree Centre was brought into the consortium originally to provide leadership of technical delivery, and I was given the role of Technical Architect accordingly. This meant my job was to oversee the successful delivery of a technical plan, so I had to do a bit of planning first and then ensure we could make it happen. We also had several other members of our Data Science and Research Software Engineering teams working on different aspects of data analysis and code optimisation for the project.

I’ve had oversight of what’s being done across the consortium of project partners: STFC’s Hartree Centre and DAFNI, CMCL Innovations, the Joint Centre of Excellence for Environmental Intelligence (JCEEI), the National Digital Twin Hub and the Universities of Edinburgh, Warwick and Newcastle.

On the industry side, Anglian Water, BT and UK Power Networks provided infrastructure data and Mott MacDonald supported us with domain expertise in infrastructure and flood modelling.

That’s lots of pieces to bring together!

Yeah, it’s a massive and quite complicated stakeholder map with a lot of moving pieces! So I’ve spent a lot of the last year joining the dots and doing agile programme planning. We’ve approached it with telecoms, water and utilities providers as the “customers” we had in mind as they’re the ones who would ultimately be able to benefit from the outputs of the project and use them to increase reliability and functionality.

A bunch of very talented people were put in front of me and I had to figure out how we could deliver as much as possible simultaneously and get it all done in time for the close of the project. We set up a secure cluster on DAFNI to put data from the asset owners all in one place, so that the scientists working on the project could access it and connect it up to develop models, without it being shared or accessed by anyone else.

What are the next steps?

The project comes to a close in March 2022, so we’re currently writing up the reports and planning a webinar to present our experiences, talk about technical achievements and lessons we’ve learned along the way so that hopefully others can learn from them too and continue to develop our ideas.

The project partners are going to collate reports and write executive summaries so we have something to help us engage with business leadership audiences that are less technical but have decision-making authority to try implementing these concepts at scale. The technical reports are there in more detail so that technical staff can understand what needs to be done.

We’re also going to continue working with the partners on this project to seek funding for the continuation of development, and hopefully further scaling up of this project. Watch this space!

Find out more about the Climate Resilience Demonstrator.

Missed the show-and-tell webinar? Watch it now

Read the technical reports

Trial by fire: My life as an apprentice

Hey, my name is Kit Newens and I’m a Digital Communications Apprentice at the STFC Hartree Centre. I decided to write this blog post for National Apprenticeship Week 2022 to share my experiences with anyone who might be considering an apprenticeship and isn’t sure whether it’s for them!

Kit Newens, Digital Communications Apprentice

How I got started

I had never considered doing an apprenticeship before and had no idea what it would entail, but after studying Forensic Psychology for four years, I was looking for work that would interest me, and my careers coach found a listing for a Digital Communications Apprentice at the Hartree Centre. I had never worked with digital comms before but after reading the job spec it seemed not only like something I would be good at but something I would enjoy, as I already did a lot of content creation in my spare time. I sent in my CV and after an interview and some skill screenings I started the role in January 2021!

Now, after doing it for over year and as I come to the end of my apprenticeship, I wanted to share what I learnt as an apprentice at the Hartree Centre.

What was rewarding about being an apprentice?

One of the main incentives of doing an apprenticeship for me, was the ability to earn while I learn. Not only do I get paid while studying but the fact that I didn’t have to pay for the education I was receiving was a huge benefit. Being able to balance both my workload and educationand having the flexibility of being able to choose what that balance is, was also really helpful. I had to do 20% off the job learning which equates to one day a week, with options to take a full day,two half-days or even split the hours through the week.

My favourite part of being an apprentice was being able to immediately apply the skills and knowledge I was learning  and getting to see the outcomes right away. For example, one week I would learn how to use Premiere Pro and the next week I’m working on filming an interview and editing the video for social media. There were other skills that I learned from being employed right away, like time management, planning and networking which I never would have had the chance to experience if I was at university.

After having a photography lesson, I practice my new skills by taking headshots of Hartree Centre staff.

As someone who did the conventional college to university route, I found that doing an apprenticeship was the best option for me. I often struggled with revision and exams but being able to immediately apply what I was learning meant that I didn’t forget it straight away. I was able to reinforce what I was learning, and instead of exams or essays I got to do practical tasks and explain my rationale in conversation.

Another cool thing was meeting people who do very different jobs and learning about all the technologies that exist at the Hartree Centre. Going from knowing nothing about supercomputers to seeing all the different uses and applications was really interesting. It was great meeting these new people because I was receiving support from colleagues and tutors who are industry professionals. They know all the neat tricks and quick cheats that come from that level of experience and are able to impart really useful knowledge when you most need it. Learning how to do a role and being supported by people who do that role made it so much easier than just trying to work out everything on my own.


“If you want to be an apprentice you need to be willing to learn and not be afraid to experiment and try new things. “

What challenges did I face?

There were some intimidating moments where I felt that “I’m not ready yet” or “I shouldn’t be here” and these were to be expected since I was doing things I had never done before or even knew about previously. But this is the main challenge of doing an apprenticeship and it’s easy to overcome when I realised that I wasn’t at the same level as my colleagues yet and that was ok. I was there to learn and this was the best way to do it.

I found it annoying sometimes when I had just started a project or was really in the flow of it to have to stop working on it to study or attend class. But this is something that comes with the qualification. I learnt how to plan and manage my time better, for example dividing up projects into smaller chunks and setting myself soft deadlines to finish those parts of a project.

One of the main struggles I found was coming into a whole new situation with very little knowledge can be quite a culture shock. I had never worked in an office setting before so I found myself sometimes having no idea what I was “supposed” to do. I didn’t realise that I wouldn’t only be learning the skills on how to do my job but also how me and my work fit in the organisation. This is something I would overcome with time and experience.

What work am I most proud of?

The work I did with the Hartree Centre Commercial Beneficiary Outcomes Report. This was the first project where I was involved in every step from start to finish. From the initial brief to the tracking of social media analytics, it was a large amount of effort I put into making this the best it could be. My favourite part of working on this was being able to apply my skills in lots of different areas. I got to design and edit different pieces of content from the infographic to a video and also got to use my social media skills to share it all. It was also the first time I had created a substantial piece of media with the infographic. It was such a big change from just doing social media work but I absolutely love the way it turned out. Not only was I proud of the outcome and the content I created but I felt confident and that I had the trust and support of my colleagues to do this on my own.

What advice would I give someone who wants to be an apprentice?

When you think of apprentices you may think of a 16 year old leaving college but as I’ve shown from my experience you can start an apprenticeship at any time. You don’t even need work experience in the field since you’re learning those skills through the role. All you need is interest and passion for the field you are going into, as long as you have that anyone can do an apprenticeship.

The main piece of advice I would give is don’t be afraid to ask for help. If you are struggling with your work or training, there are lots of people who are there to support and guide you. It can be easy to bottle it up and try and do everything yourself but being able to ask for assistance will make your life so much easier. This also comes in the form of customising your experience and not being afraid to communicate what works best for you.

After volunteering to do a interview, I find myself on the other side of the camera for the first time.

If you want to be an apprentice you need to be willing to learn and not be afraid to experiment and try new things. You will be presented with a plethora of opportunities from both your work role and your apprenticeship studies. You should grab as many as possible and try to meet as many new people as you can. If an opportunity pops up for you to educate yourself in a different aspect of your organisation you should grab it with both hands.

If you would like to find out more about STFC apprenticeships and how to join, check out our careers page.

What our customers think | Managing our Impact

Hear from our Head of Impact Management Karen Lee and find out about her role at the Hartree Centre and her highlights from our recent commercial outcomes survey.

Karen Lee, Head of Impact Management

Anyone working in the research and innovation eco-system will be very familiar with the concept of ‘impact’ and generating benefits to the UK economy and its people.

As an applied research centre focused on supporting industry in their adoption of transformational digital technologies such as AI and data analytics, this one word, impact, summarises what the Hartree Centre is all about. My role is to help us show it.

The recent AI Activity in UK Businesses report estimates that companies’ annual expenditure on AI technologies was over £62 billion in 2020. With the right conditions in place (for example by reducing the barriers to adoption… which is what we do), they predict that total AI expenditure could grow 11-17% annually over the next five years. Whilst the Impact of AI on Jobs report estimates that such technologies could boost our economy by as much as 10% of GDP by 2030. So we are talking pretty significant numbers here!

It’s exciting that the Hartree Centre (and therefore my talented colleagues) is one of the delivery mechanisms to achieve this. As their Head of Impact Management, my focus is on demonstrating the benefits from our portfolio of projects and programmes by helping us to measure and understand the value we contribute to the organisations we collaborate with, as well as to the wider economy and society.

One way this is done is by capturing information – via surveys and interviews – on customers’ experiences of working with us and tracking this over time. We’ve just published an independent report which has provided useful insight into our portfolio of commercial projects.


The key findings from the report are based on 31% of past user organisations engaging in commercial projects completed up to the end of January 2021.

The Commercial Beneficiary Outcomes report is interesting to me on a number of levels. First off, I want to put a shout out to all of the people that make the Hartree Centre ‘work’ and I am proud that 94% of respondents stated they already had, or would, recommend us to others. The work my colleagues do is remarkable – it is right on the cutting-edge and more often than not beyond my realm of understanding.

Back to the organisations… even if you just look at the sectors they operate in, it really does show that digital technologies pretty much touch every part of the economy.

And these businesses are not all at the same stage of their digital transformation journey either. Some are just starting out, with an idea in mind but unsure of whether it would work or where it might take their business, whilst others are optimising processes or product development. I think this is demonstrated in the range of outcomes reported, which indicate important improvements in productivity, performance, skills and R&D investment. For example:

  • 76% reported that the strategic importance of adopting and applying digital technologies had increased
  • 65% have seen an increased investment in R&D within their organisation
  • 84% have improved the extent to which their organisation uses or exploits data.
  • 89% have increased their in-house technical expertise and capabilities

Other benefits reported included:

  • Enhanced confi­dence in products and services
  • Improved effectiveness of product development
  • Optimised processes
  • Reduced product development costs
  • Reduced time to market
  • Increased sales or profi­tability
  • Enhanced reputation

Although after a project you’ll get a picture of the early outcomes and future potential, the nature of innovation is such that full benefits often take time to be realised. Our survey reflects this in that 79% of participants said that they expect to see further commercial benefits over the next 1-3 years.

Following this research, as part of the Hartree Centre’s continuous improvement work, we’ve enhanced our evidence collection so that we capture information before, after and 2-3 years after our projects to track how benefits accrue to achieve impact over time.

If you’d like to find out more, take a look at the public summary of the report or our infographic. We also have some fantastic case studies which tell a powerful story of some of our individual client projects.


Meet the team | Training and Events Manager

We spoke to Nia Alexandrova about her role at the STFC Hartree Centre, what keeps her coming into work every day and how the shift towards remote-working has changed the way events are run.

Can you introduce yourself and tell us about your role at the Hartree Centre?  
I am the Training and Events Manager, so my responsibilities involve building and designing the Hartree Centre’s training strategy and programme. This means working with the researchers in their area of applied research to design specific courses and learning materials for different audiences and entry levels. It can also involve managing the process of organising and delivering an event. Because of my background and own research, I am able to support people in finding better ways to teach depending on different audiences. Specifically, my research is in collaborative training and collaborative learning in technology-rich environments. 

So your background is in research? 
My education was in engineering but that was a very long time ago! I started as a research assistant and was involved with some programmes that were being overhauled and transitioned from Liverpool University to the University of Reading. I then went to work in Barcelona Supercomputing Centre to help define and develop their training programme. We built up a team, starting with myself and later Maria-Ribera Sancho (former Dean of FIB – Barcelona School of Informatics), to create a coordinated approach. from the ground up to create a coordinated approach. When I came back to the UK, I joined the STFC Talent Pool and this opportunity in training and events came up which was well suited to my skills! I also knew Alison Kennedy (who had just become the Director of the Hartree Centre at the time) from being acquainted with Women in HPC and she confirmed to me that this was probably a place where I would want to work! 

A woman with mid length brown hair and a mustard coloured shirt presenting in front of a large curved screen showing an image of a supercomputer.

So she was right then! What keeps you coming to work every day?  
I hate doing the same thing over and over again and working at the Hartree Centre is very exciting and quite challenging in that way – every day is different! For example with HNCDI’s EXPLAIN training programme, we are working on the challenge of enticing people to engage with training they may never have thought they needed. It’s easy to present supercomputing and AI to an academic audience but more difficult to engage with individuals or private companies and their leadership, who may not be aware of the benefits of upskilling their teams in digital transformation, computing or AI. At the moment we are in an interesting time, people are becoming aware of the need for digital transformation. 

For the Hartree Centre too, the entire time I’ve been working here we have been growing and evolving. We are finding different ways to develop things, finding the best way to support people and exploring how to teach in the best possible way. The challenge is ensuring that when you’re training individuals, you’re giving them the skills they need not just in their own job, but to go and change behaviours and attitudes to digital transformation in their own company. 

What would you say has been your biggest challenge recently? 
Until the COVID-19 pandemic, all our training has been hands-on and face-to-face in the physical Hartree Centre building. So the recent – and very sudden – transition to virtual events were initially very disruptive for us and a time for fast problem-solving! 

However now we can recognise that it was an inevitable step forward that was just accelerated by the global circumstances, and the Hartree Centre Training, Events and Communications teams worked together really well to find a way to support everyone digitally in a short timeframe. It became an ultimately positive experience that enabled us to enhance our training offering and we are continuing to explore the use of hybrid, virtual and face-to-face events and refine our approach. 

Woman wearing mustard colour shirt pointing at a computer screen and smiling.

So as an events manager, what kind of events do you like to attend? 
 Big international conferences like Supercomputing or ISC are always interesting. When you are physically attending these exhibitions, they feel enormous, we are talking about thousands and thousands of people – and that is an exciting atmosphere. I can share best practice with the global HPC training community and be part of meetings and get involved with the communities that I wouldn’t encounter locally. It helps you to see the bigger picture and also gain some exposure for your organisation. I have seen some really interesting keynotes and in recent years there was a trend of not only inviting people from  the high performance computing (HPC) industry but people who are slightly outside of it. That is a really interesting way to see how someone’s work in industry intersects with HPC outside of the HPC research community.

When you’re not at work, what do you most enjoy doing?  
I love drawing so I go to a life drawing group every Monday. I don’t like to sit and watch TV, I have to have my hands busy so I do knitting and crochet a bit. I love the Daresbury Laboratory book club, it’s a lot of fun, and I’m glad we continued it on Zoom during the pandemic. I’m grateful for living near Daresbury because it is a very beautiful area. I always knew this but during lockdown, I started to appreciate it even more because it allows you to do 5 or 10 minute walks very close to home and you get to go around and see ducks, flowers and woodlands and all the time I’m thinking if I was living in a big city I would miss this. 

You can catch up with Nia’s work by exploring our upcoming training events on the Hartree Centre websiteregister your interest for fully booked events or sign up for future updates by subscribing to the Hartree Centre newsletter 

Data science and AI help for SMEs in Cheshire and Warrington

Hi! I am Tim Powell, a Business Development Manager at the Hartree Centre. In this blog post I am going to be talking about a relatively new funding opportunity for SMEs that I’m working on at the moment, Cheshire & Warrington 4.0. 

Tim Powell, Business Development Manager, STFC Hartree Centre

So, what is CW4.0? 

Cheshire and Warrington 4.0 (CW4.0) is an EDRF fully-funded programme of hands on support for businesses in Cheshire and Warrington focused on the exploration and adoption of digital technologies. The programme is built on the success of LCR 4.0 which supported over 300 companies in the Liverpool City Region to develop new products, decrease time to market, and accelerate productivity and turnover – all while creating 125 new jobs!  

Through the CW4.0 programme SMEs in Cheshire and Warrington can access technical expertise from our team of experts here at the Hartree Centre. Our data scientists and software engineers have a strong track record of working on collaborative projects to solve industry challenges. To give you an idea, here are some examples of the areas we work in:

  • Artificial Intelligence applications, including machine learning and natural language processing 
  • Predictive maintenance and data analytics 
  • Modelling and simulation 
  • Software development and optimisation 
  • Cloud migration and applications 
  • IoT (Internet of Things) integration 

Our first CW4.0 engagement has already kicked off with G2O Water Technologies, Tristan Philips the VP of Engineering has this to say about his hopes for the outcome of the project: 

“Being able to do Computational Fluid Dynamics at Hartree is essential to model and design enhanced membranes that are able to filter almost unfilterable waters, extract precious materials from water streams and decarbonise the water industry.”

Tristan Phillips, VP Engineering
G2O Water Technologies

We have also just kicked off a project with Chester-based Circles Health & Wellbeing who are looking to develop an AI chatbot for assistance in mental health services and are developing more projects in the pipeline covering areas such as predictive maintenance, using machine learning to improve routing algorithms and building data warehouses. 

“We are excited to be working with STFC on this hugely important healthcare project. Mental health patient numbers are ever-growing and placing a huge strain on healthcare services which are buckling under the pressure. Working with the Hartree Centre – a respected AI development partner – will enable us to build a dedicated healthcare assistant solution that will set a benchmark for similar future conversational AI assistants, delivering cost-efficient, patient-centric support services that enhance a client’s healthcare experience, build confidence in more human/tech blended healthcare solutions and deliver positive, measurable outcomes. The pressure to get this right is colossal and we are delighted to have such a talented and knowledgeable partner to work alongside us.”

Tom Mackarel , Director and Co-founder
Circles Health & Wellbeing

How does it work? 

CW4.0 projects can vary from creating a brand new proof of concept (PoC) or minimum viable product (MVP) to help accelerate a start-up to market or to add value to an existing product through digitisation. The process of engaging with us on a CW4.0 project is simpler than many other grant applications.  

After an initial discussion with me to define the challenge statement followed by an eligibility check, I engage with our technical staff to write a project scope that will look to create a custom solution to a company’s specific industry challenge. The project scope will be presented back to the company for fine tuning before we go ahead and submit the final application with each CW4.0 technical project typically lasting 2 – 4 months. 

The process works really well for companies who already know how and what they want to innovate on but if your company is interested in digital innovation and not sure which direction to take or the options available to you, don’t worry, we can help with that too.  

CW4.0 is also designed to help signpost companies in the right direction by offering a fully funded, risk-free, feasibility study or digital innovation report. Our experience working across a wide range of industries from engineering and manufacturing and life sciences to energy, professional services and transport will be used alongside our technical expertise to benefit you. The feasibility study or digital innovation report will be created working alongside your company as domain experts to discover what will work best for you.

Manufacturing your digital future | CW4.0

Not just digital innovation – from virtual to physical 

Here at STFC, alongside the Hartree Centre there is another department who are delivering support as part of CW4.0 so I would like to take some time to showcase how the Campus Technology Hub (CTH) can also benefit SMEs across Cheshire and Warrington. 

Companies can access a range of 3D printing capabilities and explore how 3D printing could aid product development and streamline manufacturing processes to reduce time and costs and look at rapid prototyping of complex designs on a project-by-project basis. With 3D printers ranging from desktop-sized, fused deposition modelling printers that can print in a variety of plastics, through to industrial metal 3D printers and material varying from plastics like PLA or ABS, to material reinforced with fibreglass or carbon fibre, resin polymers and 316 stainless steel – the possibilities are endless! 

To find out more about accessing support from the Campus Technology Hub specifically, you can contact my colleague Michaela at michaela.kiernan@stfc.ac.uk

Am I eligible? 

The main eligibility criteria for CW4.0 are that the company is classed as an SME, haven’t used the allocated state aid, and have a registered premise in the postcode catchment area below: 

Cheshire Warrington Chester 
CW1 WA1 CH1 
CW2 WA2 CH2 
CW3 WA4 CH3 
CW4 WA5 CH4 
CW5 WA6 CH64 
CW6 WA7 CH65 
CW7 WA8 CH66 
CW8 WA13  
CW9 WA16  
CW10   
CW11   
CW12   

Who can help me? 

To discuss how the Hartree Centre can provide innovation support to your business, help increase productivity, access new markets, kickstart new product and job creations and enable growth through CW4.0, please get in touch with at info@candw4.uk. 


Part-funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), CW4.0 brings together the combined expertise and capabilities of the Virtual Engineering Centre (University of Liverpool), Liverpool John Moores University, the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) and the Northern Automotive Alliance. 

Nature to combat social isolation

Aiman Shaikh, one of our Research Software Engineers tells us more about the steps she has taken to tackle feelings of isolation during the pandemic by organising walks, playing badminton and exploring nature with friends and colleagues across the North West.

Aiman enjoying the great outdoors!

For people like me who live far away from families, the current situation of lockdown certainly started to take a negative effect. Since everything started back in March when we switched to working from home, I had a very limited social contact with colleagues and friends. After the peak of the virus, as soon as it was safe to do so, I planned to organise walks. Initially, in July, this was limited to local parks with only one or two other people, following social distancing. Gradually, I extended it to more colleagues who live by themselves, assuring them that we would be abiding by all recommended safety measures as I completely understand anxiety during this time. After organising various local parks walk, we ventured further to do a walk exploring West Kirby and a walk across Rhyl beach in Wales with a small group.

Aiman and the rest of the group enjoying time in Snowdonia.

My first walking trip was to Delamere forest over the August bank holiday. It was a very lovely sunny day, and I managed to gather Charlotte Freeman, David Bray, Helen Newton and family, Judicael Grasset (SCD), Benjamin Breig (Quantum Science Ltd at Daresbury) as well as my friend, Kanchan. It was a success after planning a sequence of trails to walk on. The group was so happy and it was great to see everyone and enjoy nature!  Benjamin went on to plan a Snowdonia trip on the following weekend and we did Y Garn via Devil’s Kitchen from the Ogwen trail. We have spotted things like Amanita muscaria commonly known as the fly agaric or fly amanita as well as a Royal Air Force Red Arrows flight!

Apart from walking and hiking, I have been actively participating in playing Badminton at leisure clubs in Warrington. This was Judicael s idea to start with but I have to say that I am really enjoying it and am now inviting more people to join us. This all prompted me to participate in the Virgin Go challenge and I’ll be organising more walks with colleagues in the coming autumn months. If anybody would like to join us, please let me know and I’ll add you to the email or WhatsApp group.

A socially-distant walk in Delamere Forest.

I know the situation at the moment is not great but activities like this have really helped me and others to get fresh air and feel active, forgetting our anxiety and worries for a while. I have many great plans for our future walks, of course following local rules and regulations and precautions. I am also planning to do some kind of virtual walk due to lockdown which I hope will involve local groups walking at different places but starting at the same time and sharing their experience at the end of the day.

HPC is Now | Supercomputing 2019

In November 2019, the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) Hartree Centre and Scientific Computing Department exhibited at international conference Supercomputing 2019 (SC19) in Denver, USA. In this blog post, Research Software Engineer Tim Powell shares some thoughts and insights from the Hartree Centre team.

Hartree Centre team members attending Supercomputing 2019.

The variety of experiences one can have at Supercomputing is vast, and I think this is a good echo for the direction high performance computing (HPC) is going. The number of different disciplines that are adopting HPC and the different techniques available to acquire your computing power are growing more diverse. When discussing the themes of SC19 with a colleague (in the stationery room of all places) I accidentally summed it up quite well: “Supercomputing 2019 was tall and broad.”

So let’s look at each aspect of this assessment – first up: “tall”. The next phase of supercomputing is exa-scale. There was a significant number of talks, birds-of-a-feather, and panels discussing exa-scale computing, the applications, software, and hardware.

Our Chief Research Officer, Vassil Alexandrov, gives his account of Supercomputing 2019 and the current exa-scale landscape here:

“Supercomputing 2019 was a busy time for me, as always! In the discussions and talks I attended, I felt that this year’s content was of an even higher quality than previous years, and I noted that there were more precise presentations delivered by researchers.

One area which I paid particular attention to was the discussion around exa-scale. The US National Labs are making big moves with their Exa-Scale Computing Project. They are investing $1.8 billion in hardware and a similar amount for the development of software. The current US roadmap is to have their first machine, Frontier, in place in Q3 of 2021 costing an estimated $400 million. With another two machines to be delivered in 2022, each costing $600 million. All 3 machines are expected to be exa-scale and are rumoured to be a combination of AMD, Intel, Cray, and NVIDIA.

Europe are also heading towards exa-scale computing – eight centres across Europe are going to host large peta-scale and pre-exa-scale machines in their program to developing exa-scale capabilities, with machines expecting to reach 150-200 peta-flops. Japan is about to install their Post-K supercomputer which is based on ARM processors and it is likely to be a very efficient machine. The expectation is for it to be operational early 2020 so I am excited to see what the results will be when it is up and running. China is also a player but that is behind closed doors at the moment. It will be interesting to see what they reveal.

Throughout SC19, it was clear that the software challenges are going to be harder than the hardware challenges. My opinion is that we are still a few years off from having true exa-scale machines.”

Vassil Alexandrov chairs the 10th Workshop on Latest Advances in Scalable Algorithms for Large-Scale Systems for academia and industry alongside Prof. Jack Dongarra (UTK & ORNL), Al Geist (ORNL) and Dr Christian Engelmann at Supercomputing 2019.

Now, let’s talk about how SC19 was broad”.

More so this year, than in previous years, have the different applications of HPC become so obvious. Multitudes of National Laboratories and Research Institutes from around the globe were seen displaying use cases on their stands in the exhibition hall, and there was a large variety of different topics discussed in talks and panels. There was, quite literally, something for everyone – assuming you have an interest or involvement in computation that is!

I think this is largely due to the growth in access to data, and new techniques such as machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) requiring disciplines that traditionally don’t use HPC to access more computing resource. Additionally, with the massively growing offering of cloud computing resource, the barrier to entry has been significantly reduced and it is easier than ever to provision a cluster-in-the-cloud.

So tall is more powerful computing, and broad is more computing applications. This all accumulates in a bigger impact of High Performance Computing, which again was echoed at SC19 with a series of talks in the 1st HPC Impact Showcase.

My personal highlight this year at SC19 was participating in the Building the Future panel at the 6th SC Workshop on Best Practices for HPC Training and Education. The all-day workshop focused around common challenges for enhancing HPC training and education, and allowed the global community to share experiences and resources to address them. The Building the Future panel focused the discussion around how we as trainers and educators can best prepare for the future of HPC and the training and education needs it will bring. The key take-away from my talk was that there is a diverse future of applications for HPC and we need to help facilitate the power of HPC to non-HPC experts who are only just finding uses for it.

Tim Powell speaks at the Building The Future panel during the 6th SC Workshop on Best Practices for HPC Training and Education.

On the following day I was fortunate enough to attend the Early Careers Program, aimed at people in the first few years of their career in HPC and delivering a variety of activities, talks, and panels. It was great to see STFC represented by Catherine Jones and Alison Kennedy. As a Research Software Engineer (RSE) I particularly enjoyed panels and talks involving RSE and members from the RSE Societies around the globe. It’s great to see that managing research software properly is being put on the international stage at conferences as big as SC! I also noted that in a series of talks on cloud computing, a lot of time was given over to discussing the advantages (rarely the disadvantages) of tailor-made HPC in the cloud.

As a team, we had great fun facilitating a very popular build-your-own Lego supercomputer activity, in the form of our very own Scafell Pike! Needless to say, our limited supplies disappeared quicker and quicker each morning as the word spread. Our HPiC Raspberry Pi cluster was also present, boasting some new and updated demos developed by our recent summer placement students James and Lizzie!

The Hartree Centre takes its supercomputer Scafell Pike to Supercomputing 2019… in Lego form!

I also spoke to some of my colleagues to get their own perspectives on SC19. Aiman Shaikh, Research Software Engineer, discussed her first time at the conference:

“I really enjoyed being part of the Women in HPC workshop, and attending technical talks around containers in HPC and LLVM compilers. The networking events held by different vendors was also a great opportunity to meet people. There was so much going on everywhere that it was difficult to keep pace with everything!

HPC and Cloud Operations at CERN was a very interesting talk by Maria Girone, who talked about technologies used at CERN, software and architecture issues and how they are investigating machine learning (ML) for object detection and reconstruction.

The Women in HPC workshop was really good, especially the keynote from Bev Crair, Lenovo, on “the butterfly effect of inclusive leadership”. Bev said that diverse teams lift performance by inviting in creativity, which I completely agree with. Another inspiring and motivating talk by Hai Ah Nam from Los Alamas National Lab talked about surviving difficult events and minimising their impact to your career. Hai explained that we cannot stop unforeseen events in life but we can focus on how to tackle them. The Women in HPC networking events, often joined by many diverse groups of people, provided a great chance to network with attendees from all different backgrounds.

The journey of exploration did not ended after SC as afterwards I went to the Rockies with some colleagues, which was fun-filled few days walking and with so little light pollution we could see the Milky Way at night!”

Aiman Shaikh gets involved in the Women in HPC workshop at Supercomputing 2019.

SC19 was a new experience for Research Software Engineer Drew Silcock too:

“Attending SC19 for the first time really exposed me to the wider scientific computing community. I gained an understanding of the various technologies used by the scientists and engineers and for what purposes they were used. Many are scaling their applications with standard MPI+ OpenMP stacks, but I attended several interesting workshops and talks about alternative technologies and approaches. Of particular interest to me are all topics relating to the development and programming languages and compilers, so I very much enjoyed hearing from people working on and with the LLVM compiler toolchain, additions to the C++ standard and the development of domain-specific languages for scientific computing.

In terms of trends, it’s exciting to see how many people are starting and continuing to use Python for scientific computing. Cloud services are also becoming increasingly relevant, especially for new companies without on premise capabilities. As machine learning models get bigger and bigger, there is more effort being put into bridging the gaps between the HPC and ML communities to ensure that they can benefit each other.”

Jony Castagna, a NVIDA Deep Learning Ambassador with 10 years experience in HPC and several years experience in Deep Learning, shared his thoughts:

“We’re seeing fast-growing applications of Deep Learning for science. Three different approaches have been identified: support/accelerate current algorithms like via AI precondition or matrix solver through Neural Networks (NN); solve partial differential equation using NN but enforcing physical information (via Physical Informed Neural Networks, PINN); fully replacing physical equations with NN trained using numerical simulation data. In particular this latest approach seems most attractive as it seems to show the capability of NN in learning the physics from data and extrapolate further at higher speed. For example, in the work of Kadupitiya, Fox and Jadhao, a simple NN has been used to predict the contact density of ions in Nanoconfinement using trained data from a Molecular Dynamic (MD) simulation. A strong match between prediction and MD simulation has been presented.

An increasing use of C++17 standard library has emerged for performance portability. Many paradigms, like Kokkos, RAJA, HPX, etc. have been presented as possible solution for targeting different architectures. However, NVIDIA doesn’t look to be standardising the heterogeneous programming, they expect the hardware to become more homogeneous between CPU and GPU. We’d like to test NN with DL_MESO to see how well they perform in reproducing coarse grain simulation. We have also applied for an ECAM2 project to port DL_MESO on C++17 and use Kokkos for performance portability. This will allow us to compare performance with the current CUDA version and understand how well Kokkos can perform.”

James Clark and Aiman Shaikh attend talks by Mellanox Technologies at Supercomputing 2019.

High Performance Software Engineer James Clark concluded:

“On Sunday I presented at the Atos Quantum Workshop. This was a showcase of how the Hartree Centre is using our Quantum Learning Machine, such as our joint training and access programme with Atos and our ongoing project work with Rolls-Royce.

I also talked about our future plans to develop quantum software that can take advantage of both quantum computing and HPC.

One of the most interesting developments in HPC this year was how far ARM CPUs have come. Riken and Fujitsu’s Fugaku is one of the major success stories, with the first deployment of the new SVE (Scalable Vector Extensions) instructions. Fujitsu announced that Cray will be bringing their ARM CPUs to the rest of the world. NVidia also announced that their GPGPUs will be supported on ARM platforms, with a number of ARM CPUs listed as supported on release. I am looking forward to the increased competition in the hardware space turns out, especially with AMD’s Rome CPUs and Intel’s Xe GPUs. The future of HPC looks to be very interesting and it’s an exciting time to be involved.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself!

Caught in the data loop?

Fresh from the Open Data Institute (ODI) Summit 2019 and bursting with questions, Holly Halford, Science and Business Engagement Manager for the STFC Hartree Centre, explores the use of personal data for online marketing and asks: how do we stop ourselves getting stuck in the data loop?

So, your friend is getting married. You post a few harmless pictures on Instagram, throwing in a few #wedding tags for good measure. The next day, you’re scrolling through your social media feeds and perusing news sites only to find that every sponsored post, every inch of ad space is now trying to sell you wedding dresses. Wedding venues. Wedding fayres. Decorative wedding trees. Things you didn’t even know existed – all useless to you and, presumably, the advertiser – but the ads are still there, taking up precious mindshare.

But you asked for this – you were the one who carelessly hashtagged your way into the echo chamber… right?

From targeted advertising to political persuasion, whether to help or hinder us, our personal data is being used on a daily basis to effect changes in our behaviour. From the extra purchase you didn’t really need to make, to the life milestones you are forced to start thinking about because your data fits a certain demographic.

New research, conducted by the ODI and YouGov and published to coincide with the recent ODI Summit 2019, concluded that nearly 9 in 10 people (87%) feel it is important that organisations they interact with use data about them ethically – but ethical means different things in different contexts to different people. In discussion at the conference, Prof. Nigel Shadbolt and Sir Tim Berners-Lee highlighted that research shows people are reasonably accepting of personal data being used for targeted advertising, but less amenable to it being used for political advertising. Tim proposed a possible reasoning for this, positioning himself as in favour of targeted commercial advertising – at least towards himself – as it generally helps to find the things you want faster, and also helps companies to make the sales that keep them in business. A “win-win” for both consumer and economy, then.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee in conversation with Professor Nigel Shadbolt and Zoe Kleinman at the ODI Summit 2019.

He suggested that political advertising is different in nature because it may make people act in a way that isn’t truly in their own personal best interest due to a manipulation or misrepresentation of information. It’s of course, possible to argue that the same can be true of misleading commercial advertising but the potential impacts are almost always limited to being purely financial – spending money you didn’t need to, getting into debt etc – and these ramifications are not significantly different to the pitfalls of marketing via any other route. Traditional print media, billboards or television advertising have all probably promised you a better life at some point, if you just buy that car, that smartphone or that deodorant.

Tim has a point – targeted advertising can be useful and makes some logical sense, especially if we have actively searched for related terms or shown our interest in a certain product or service by interacting with content related to it. Despite how 1984 it can feel sometimes, I’m actually personally much more comfortable with data-driven advertising based around our active behaviors as opposed to the other option – the demographic based approach, which I feel has the potential to be far more insidious.

There’s a beauty product advert in my Facebook feed. If I click on the “why am I seeing this” feature, I am quickly informed that Company X “is trying to reach females aged 25 to 54”. Whilst the transparency is a welcome change, it doesn’t fill me with hope that a significant proportion of the media thrust upon us each day is tailored based on nothing more than gender or other divisive demographics. I often wonder how many men have beauty product adverts showing up in their feeds compared to say… cars, watches, sporting equipment? (I unscientifically and anecdotally tested this theory on a colleague recently, a man in a similar age bracket to myself. He reported an unusually high capacity of DIY ads.)

Credit: Death To Stock

The data bias is there, entrenched in historic trends that have potentially damaging consequences in the perpetuation of gender stereotypes and more – if your demographic fits the initial (and undoubtedly biased) statistical trend, do we now, via data-driven marketing, perpetuate it for all eternity?

But how do we address the very fundamentals of marketing and communications without perpetuating stereotypes and pushing conformity to social norms? As a marketing and communications professional, I confess that the commonly used concept of developing “personas” to describe your target audience and help articulate your message more clearly to them has never sat well with me, because those personas by nature are based on stereotypes and assumptions. Knowing your audience is an absolutely crucial pillar of marketing, but if you only ever acknowledge an existing or expected audience, how do you access new markets and prevent alienating potential customers outside of that bracket? Not to mention the ethical concerns this approach flags up. We need to take a more creative approach to get messages heard without excluding anyone. It may not be the easiest route but I’m certain that it is possible, more ethical and when executed successfully, more effective.

So, what can we, as consumers, do to prevent trapping ourselves with our own hashtags and search terms? The current options seem fairly lacking. Perhaps we can turn to AI-driven discovery of “things you might enjoy”. Features like this can be found on most common media platforms, with varying degrees of success. But as the algorithms get more accurate, the tighter the loop closes. As Tim purported, the intention is to be helpful and save us time – if only to provide a good user experience that keeps you invested in using the platform, of course – but everything it suggests will be based on existing tastes and activity. If you’re predisposed to playing Irish folk music, good luck getting Spotify to suggest you might have an undiscovered a passion for post-progressive rock.

Credit: Death To Stock

This presents a bigger problem when considering the landscape of opinions, causes and politics. The idea of social media curating our own personal echo chambers and arenas of confirmation bias is not a new one. It’s true that we can subscribe to contrasting interest groups, a tactic some journalists have been using – but how many of us have the patience to subject ourselves to a cacophony of largely irrelevant content, if it’s not a professional requirement? A more pressing question is: if we don’t interact positively (or at all) with that “alternate” content, does another algorithm begin to de-prioritise it until we no longer see it anyway and we’re back where we started?

Is the answer in a change of algorithms, then? The tactic of ignoring trends and demographics seems to be entirely at odds with the notion of creating better, more accurate AI algorithms and data-driven technologies. Whether we like it or not, they are meant to do exactly that – generate accurate predictions based on statistically evidenced trends and demographics. I feel quite strongly that a great deal more creative thought is required to ensure that ethical practices and regulations are instigated in line with the pace of technological advancement, and prevent data-driven marketing from driving us round in circles for the foreseeable future.

Afterword: I wrote the majority of this blog post before the launch of the Contract for the Web recently announced by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. It presents an encouraging and much needed first step towards safeguarding all the opportunities the internet presents and championing fairness, safety and empowerment. Now, let’s act on it.

Collaborating to deliver projects

On 8 October 2019 Business Transformation Manager, Neil Runciman and Head of Programmes, Claire Trinder went to a joint conference from the Association of Project Managers (APM) and Institute of Collaborative Working (ICW) with the theme of “Collaborating to deliver projects.” They both share experiences and reflections from the day:

Claire Ward and Jeremy Campbell from the Institute of Collaborative Working (ICW) set the scene for the day with their “Delivering more through collaboration” presentation highlighting how embedding collaborative working in to organisations assists in building long term, sustainable relationships which help to deliver projects. They mentioned the House of Commons and UK Home Office had particularly been enthusiastic in their adoption of collaborative working while also discussing reasons that collaboration can fail. Often this is due to perception of collaborative working, some see it as a selling technique or don’t understand the requirements leading to individuals acting in silos and not demonstrating the appropriate skills or behaviours.

Image credit: APM Events

The next session was led by Ben Cross who shared lessons learned from delivering the £1.5billion A4 road programme – collaboration was key to this, not only between three main contractors but also between a myriad of subcontractors to ensure project success. Actions taken throughout the project to encourage a culture of collaboration included:

  • Common procurement, reducing stoppages and securing better pricing for materials and machinery
  • Open book reporting for all contractors
  • Board members for collaboration, procurement and stakeholder management
  • A commitment to recruit or develop excellent project leaders throughout

A common vision connecting teams to a purpose and ensuring sufficient resources and training were embedded throughout the actions above, ultimately helping the team to deliver the project to cost, with minimum traffic disruption and a low accident rate.

Next up was something a little more practical, led by John Doyle to demonstrate working towards shared objectives with shared benefits. The exercise saw us work in teams of six to design and build part-sections of paper bridges to transport a table tennis ball over three metres but using only A4 paper, sellotape and scissors! Our team enjoyed this and were successful in putting our project management expertise to the test by quickly identifying and filling the necessary roles, working well as a team and overcoming last minute obstacles while still achieving a win-win situation with both client and supplier benefitting.

Neil Runciman taking part in the practical bridge building session. Image credit: APM Events

Jonathan Canioni from Warwick Business School offered an academic perspective to the conference discussions, quoting several successful examples of collaboration including ‘Food for the Soul’ – a programme between an established chef, the Catholic church, local markets and supermarkets in Naples to provide food to those living in poverty. Discussions continued to examples where collaboration had failed – a private banking app that misunderstood the relationship between bank and customer – when even best intentions and aligned incentives can be administered ineffectively. Key learning points from Jonathan’s talk were that collaboration and coordination are bound together in a number of ways, therefore, although coordination is not quite as valuable as collaboration, it is a necessary step on the way and worth striving for if collaboration is unattainable.

“Hartree Centre places tremendous value on and recognises the benefit of collaborative work and we embed this in many ways. From multi-partner grant funded consortia, to individual collaborative research projects with SMEs or larger national organisations, to our most recent 5 year collaborative Innovation Return on Research programme which partners with IBM Research and UK plc. The workshop was a great opportunity to step away from the day to day and reflect on how we achieve our collaborations and opportunities for us to improve on these in the future. The presentations throughout the day gave great insight, especially on how to define collaboration behaviours up front and as Neil highlights, the criticality of great leadership in supporting this. I really enjoyed the practical exercise as well, although I think our session was slightly more chaotic than Neil’s! However the same is often true in real life, and it is how chaos and uncertainty is managed that is also key to success.”

Claire Trinder, Head of Programmes

“For me, this was an interesting day full of sharing experiences and offering new perspectives. I found Ben Cross’ presentation particularly worthwhile as it offered learning points that are directly applicable to complex projects with multiple suppliers while also highlighting the wide benefits of great leadership. I would have appreciated hearing a contractor’s view of collaboration to ensure a balanced view of the reality of collaborating to deliver projects.”

Neil Runciman, Business Transformation Manager

Better Software, Bigger Impact

Since the term was first coined in 2012 , Research Software Engineering has experienced a rapid growth, first in the UK and then overseas.  Today there are at least 20 RSE groups at Universities and Research Institutes across the UK alone, alongside thousands of self-identifying RSEs, numerous national RSE associations, and since earlier this year, a registered Society of Research Software Engineering* to promote the role of RSEs in supporting research. 

The core proposition of RSEs is “Better Software, Better Research” – by improving the quality of software developed by researchers, we enable higher quality research.  Software quality is a broad topic, but the most common benefits of academic RSEs are:

  • improved reliability – fewer software errors leading to incorrect results
  • better performance – enabling more accurate and/or bigger science
  • reproducibility – increasing confidence in scientific results.

Since early 2018 the Hartree Centre has been building up an RSE capability of its own, but for slightly different reasons.  Rather than being measured on research output, Hartree Centre’s mission is to create economic impact through the application of HPC, data analytics and AI.  Most often this means taking existing research software, and applying it to solve industrial challenges.  One of the key challenges we have is crossing the “valley of death” from a proof-of-concept, where we demonstrate that a given tool, algorithm or method can in principle be used to solve a problem, to actual industry adoption of this approach.  While reliability and performance are still important here, often the key issues for a company adopting new software are usability, portability and security.

In practice, while our RSE team shares many skills in common with academic RSEs – such as employing best practices for use of version control, code review and automated testing – we specialise in areas like building simple User Interfaces for complex software, automating workflows involving HPC and deploying web applications securely to the cloud ready for industry use. 

Introducing some members of the Hartree Centre RSE team.

Our team has grown to 14 staff, comprising a range of roles from Degree Apprentices, RSEs with specialisms in HPC, AI and data analytics, to Full Stack Developers and a Software Architect. 

Just like academic RSEs, we’re at our best when working in collaboration, whether that’s with the other technology teams across the Hartree Centre, commercial clients, or our technology partners like IBM Research. 

Some of the projects we’ve been working on recently include:

We’re still recruiting – if you want be part of the Hartree RSE journey please apply here, we’d love to hear from you!

*Full disclosure: I’m a founding trustee of the society.

Meeting the Women of Silicon Roundabout – present and future!

Aiman Shaikh, one of our Research Software Engineers recently attended Women of Silicon Roundabout 2019 – one of the largest gatherings of female technologists in Europe – held at ExCeL London. In this blog post, Aiman tells us more about her motivations for attending the two day event aiming to make an impact on the gender gap and boost careers of attendees.

My main motivation for attending the conference was the opportunity to be among 6,000 attendees who were all like me: eager to connect, learn and take action on gender diversity and inclusion in the workplace. Women of Silicon Roundabout 2019 brought together a programme of inspirational keynotes, panel discussions, networking opportunities, technical classes, and career development workshops – it was the first and only conference I have attended where female technical speakers took centre stage.

For me, the chance to hear from inspirational leaders – many of whom were women – about emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), data analytics, blockchain and cloud computing. This coupled with the strong messages throughout the conference about the importance of diversity and inclusion was truly incredible.

Over 6,000 delegates attended the two day event at ExCeL London.
Image credit: Women of Silicon Roundabout.

One of the many worthwhile sessions I attended was from Denise Jones, Senior Product Manager, LetGo. Denise discussed whether AI has given rise to new and distinctive ethical issues and she challenged the group with statements like “algorithms can predict user preference based on previous activity and based on other users who are like them” raising important questions about how we as technologists can be mindful of bias in our work with AI. It made me really consider the balance of collecting data to provide a better user experience and product personalisation as good thing but collecting too much data and over-targeting audiences can go wrong and be frustrating for users if it’s not relevant.

I also attended the “Confident Speaking for Women” workshop led by Sarah Palmer, Director of European Business Development at PowerSpeaking. This was an incredibly useful 60 minutes packed full of exercises specifically designed to improve presentation skills. It gave loads of helpful tips for ‘presentation newbies’ like myself such as the importance of trying things out in advance and how to project confidence and credibility, especially through using effective nonverbal language. I’m looking forward to implementing several of these strategies in my own conference talks!

Another real highlight of the conference was the Women of Colour networking lunch on the second day of the event. Organised by Google, it was a chance to ‘inspire and be inspired.’ I was fortunate enough to meet with so many role models in tech and find out from them how they progressed in their career, how they managed their work/life balance and grow my own professional networks. I was also lucky to be able to meet with groups of fantastic early career women who were keen to find out more about my job and the Hartree Centre. I really enjoyed telling them more about my role and day to day life as part of the Research Software Engineering team – I hope to see some of them apply for some of our job vacancies as they would be great assets to any team!

Aiman Shaikh | Research Software Engineer | Hartree Centre
Image credit: STFC

I loved this conference – it provided a much-needed, necessary platform to women in technology, inspiring attendees to talk and network with women working across different industries and using a variety of emerging technologies in their day to day jobs. I’ll certainly be taking many of the lessons learned back to the Hartree Centre – it has inspired me to think about AI and data analytics in some of my upcoming projects and how I can make sure I continue to incorporate diversity and inclusion in to my work and professional networks.

Creating value for business and the UK economy – evaluating our impact

Karen Lee, Head of Impact, discusses the importance of understanding and measuring impact following the publication of the Hartree Centre’s first evaluation study.

The Hartree Centre is transforming UK industry through high performance computing, big data and cognitive technologies.

That’s our mission. But how do we know whether the research and innovation support we provide to businesses actually creates any value to them or the UK economy? Do we really need to know?

The quick answers to these questions are ‘through impact evaluation’ and ‘yes, we do’. But I would urge you to humour me a little and read on… Continue reading “Creating value for business and the UK economy – evaluating our impact”

Research Software Engineering conference 2018 #RSE18

On 3rd September the peaceful campus of Birmingham University came alive with bubbling groups of research software engineers, talking in excited tones about their latest optimisation tool and favourite python library, as the third annual conference of Research Software Engineers was started!

A real global affair, #RSE18 had 314 delegates from 12 countries. That represents a nearly 50% increase over last year’s attendance and also a 7% increase in women attending compared to 2017.

Big News!

UK RSE Association is turning into the Society of Research Software Engineering! A legal, independent, professional organisation!

The UK RSE Association has seen significant growth since its inception in 2013, to over 1000 members. The community’s growth has made the informal, volunteer run format unsustainable. The move will enable the society to hold funds, employ staff, and operate as an independent organisation to represent the interests of the RSE community. Visit the RSE website for more information and sign up to receive updates.

Continue reading “Research Software Engineering conference 2018 #RSE18”

Introducing HPiC, the Hartree Centre’s Raspberry Pi Cluster

The Hartree Centre has a new pocket-sized addition to our data centre! One of our Research Software Engineers, Tim Powell tells us all about it…

​HPiC has been created as a host for software demonstrations and for outreach events. It simulates a supercomputer by networking together 20 Raspberry Pi 3 Model B’s, allowing them to communicate and execute parallel programs.

The Raspberry Pi is a low-cost, low-power, single-board computer designed to make computer science more accessible to amateur developers, schools, and developing countries. Released in 2013, Raspberry Pis can be used for a wide range of applications – from robotics, to music streaming, to smart mirrors! The incredibly versatile Raspberry Pi 3 computer has a Quad Core 1.2Ghz ARM processor at its heart, 1GB of RAM, WiFi, Bluetooth capabilities and a whole host of device connectivity via a GPIO connector.

​​HPiC replicates high performance computing (HPC) techniques and can perform over 1,000 million instructions per second. HPiC has 19 ‘worker’ nodes (1 node = 1 raspberry pi), each with a quad-core ARM processor, resulting in 76 cores to utilise for parallel computing. The remaining node is called the ‘Head Node’ and allows us to interact and submit jobs to the ‘worker’ nodes.

Continue reading “Introducing HPiC, the Hartree Centre’s Raspberry Pi Cluster”

International Women’s Day 2018 | Janet Lane-Claypon

To mark International Women’s Day, Hartree Centre Data Scientist, Simon Goodchild writes a blog post to celebrate the work of a pioneering epidemiologist and doctor Janet Lane-Claypon. At the time of writing the post, Simon was studying medical statistics for the first time as part of a statistical society diploma and was surprised to have not previously heard about a woman who had invented two of the key techniques he was learning about!

Janet Lane-Claypon

How do you know that your treatment actually works?

How do you know whether something in the environment may impact upon your health?

These are some of the most basic and most important questions in medicine and epidemiology. Getting good answers is vital, and nowadays there are established procedures for finding sensible answers. Several of these can be traced back to the under-recognised work of Janet Lane-Claypon in the early part of the 20th century.

Continue reading “International Women’s Day 2018 | Janet Lane-Claypon”

Shaping IT Service Management at The Hartree Centre: Continual Service Improvement

The last in a series of blog posts from Dave Cable, Head of Service Operations here at The Hartree Centre summarises the steps we have taken to implement IT Service Management. 

In previous posts, I described three key components of ITIL infrastructure which we have implemented at the Hartree Centre – Service Operations, Service Design and Service Transition.  These are all inter-dependent and equal in stature.  However, there is one further area of ITIL which is slightly different because it underpins all of the above – Continual Service Improvement (CSI).  Continuous improvement is vital, because it ensures that processes and functions do not remain static.  They develop and improve in response to operational lessons learnt, leading to overall improvements in service quality.  Continuous improvement provides a feedback mechanism and tools to incorporate that feedback.  It can also work with quality management tools.

ITIL provides two complementary tools to implement CSI – the Deming Cycle, and the Seven-step Improvement Process.

Continue reading “Shaping IT Service Management at The Hartree Centre: Continual Service Improvement”

Work experience at the Hartree Centre

In this post we talk about developing activities for the Hartree Centre work experience programme and what happened when we challenged 6 students to work together to build a 20-node mini super computer.

STFC runs a work experience programme every year with applicants expressing an interest in placements within the centre. Initially, we had a view of taking just one student to join our Future Technologies team but after hearing about other placements, we wanted to move away from the ‘lone student’ experience and offer a group-based opportunity. We hoped that this would show students how we operate here in multi-disciplinary teams working together to solve challenges. As a result, 6 students from local colleges joined us for 2 weeks to find out more about life here at the Hartree Centre.

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Shaping IT Service Management at The Hartree Centre: Service Design

The third in a series of blog posts from Dave Cable, Head of Service Operations here at The Hartree Centre gives us an introduction to service design, transition, configuration management and change management. 

In my previous post, I described the key aspects of the ITIL Service Operation area that we have implemented at the Hartree Centre.  In this post, I’ll move on to Service Design and Service Transition.

What is Service Design?

The ITIL area of Service Strategy considers all the business requirements for IT services, and from them constructs a high-level view of the range of services to be offered.  Service Design turns this high-level portfolio into a set of service specifications for inclusion in the organisation’s Service Catalogue.  It takes account of the requirements for information security, availability and capacity.  Service catalogue entries also include details of standard service levels (SLA metrics) and provide, where appropriate, pricing information.  Note that non-standard service levels may be negotiated with individual customers.

Continue reading “Shaping IT Service Management at The Hartree Centre: Service Design”

Diversity & Inclusion in HPC

High Performance Computing (HPC) and High Performance Data Analytics (HPDA) – the provenance of the Hartree Centre – are rapidly expanding areas of importance to academia and industry, with myriad new employment opportunities arising. It is predicted that the gap between supply and demand of skilled staff will continue to grow. Despite the face that women make up 51% of the population, on average only around 15% of people working in IT are women. The proportion working in HPC and HPDA is even less. When taken in conjunction with recent evidence that diverse teams and organisations outperform less diverse competitors, there are sound business reasons why Diversity and Inclusion is a priority, as well as moral and social imperatives.

I am one of the founders of Women in HPC, which was formed in the UK by a small group of women who were interested in exploring the reasons why so few women were working in all areas of High Performance Computing. From small beginnings, it has grown into an organisation and network with global reach, holding programmes of events at the major international supercomputing and IT conferences.

Continue reading “Diversity & Inclusion in HPC”

EuroEXA: working together to build an exascale demonstrator

As proud members of the European HPC community, I think it’s safe to say our efforts to achieve a world-class extreme scale, power-efficient and resilient HPC platform are ambitious. We’re working towards a machine that can scale to 100 petaflops.

This three and a half year, 20 million euro Horizon2020 funded project has been designed to answer these challenges:

  • How do we build an exascale machine within a sensible energy budget?
  • How do we design something so that we’re not moving huge amounts of data around?
  • How do we achieve our ambitions cost-effectively?
  • How do we deal with all of the complexity associated with running applications on a machine of that size?

First of all, it’s important to note here that we’re not going to be starting from scratch. EuroEXA will build on previous projects that have demonstrated smaller elements of our community ambitions. This learning has directed the approach to EuroEXA and Professor John Goodacre based at The University of Manchester is leading the project and has pulled together a consortium of 40 partners industry and academic partners across Europe. Each project partner will play a fundamental role in bringing together key components of this undertaking. We’ll explain the specific role we’ll have here at the Hartree Centre later on.

Continue reading “EuroEXA: working together to build an exascale demonstrator”

Shaping IT Service Management at The Hartree Centre: Service Operation

The second in a series of blog posts from Dave Cable, Head of Service Operations here at The Hartree Centre gives us an introduction to Service Operation, the primary interface for service delivery with customers.

In the first post of this series, I gave a brief description of IT Service Management and the specific implementation we have adopted, known as ITIL.  In this post, I describe how we have implemented one function and three key processes from the ITIL area of Service Operation.

What is Service Operation?

Service Operation is the collection of processes and functions that describe how to deliver services to customers at agreed levels.

Why is it important?

Service Operation represents the primary interface for service delivery with customers.  As such, it can win or lose business.  It also helps the service provider, by providing clear mechanisms for prioritising customer requests for assistance, and tools to identify deep-rooted issues that require additional effort to resolve.

Continue reading “Shaping IT Service Management at The Hartree Centre: Service Operation”

Inspiration, ideas and innovation: Girls in Tech outreach event

In this post, Katharina Reusch, a Software Engineer from IBM Research takes us through their second annual ‘Girls in Tech’ event held on Ada Lovelace Day.

It was that time of year for the second annual “Girls in Tech” outreach event, organised by Katharina Reusch from IBM Research in collaboration with the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). The event was sponsored and initiated by IBM UK Foundation (our Early Professionals Programme for Graduates, Apprentices, Interns and Futures) and the IBM Girls Who Can team. Girls Who Can is a support network within IBM UK Foundation, with the aim to provide a healthy and positive environment where not just women, but all the work force, can prosper and fulfil their potential. After a successful trial event with 80 girls back in October 2016, we decided to go even bigger this year and run a joint event at STFC’s Daresbury (DL) and Rutherford Laboratory (RAL) Campus with 90 girls at each site, aged 12-13.

We had a busy day, packed with activities to introduce the girls to our cutting-edge technologies and where our products fit in everyday life along with our aspirations for where future technologies can make an impact. This was illustrated with demonstrations of IBM and STFC projects currently underway in the UK.

 

The girls also had a chance to quiz us in a career Q&A session (the most popular session on the day!), to understand how to get into a technology career with all the different avenues available to them, from work experience, apprenticeships, graduate schemes and professional career development.

But a day learning about technology is nothing without a bit of hands-on experience: In the Arduino coding challenge, the girls had to code and wire up a temperature sensor for the Ada Lovelace Earth Observation Satellite. Again, this proved to be a very popular session with great feedback from both volunteers, teachers and pupils.

“Science and innovation wouldn’t be possible without inspired minds, great ideas and grand challenges.”

Science and Innovation wouldn’t be possible without inspired minds, great ideas and grand challenges, so for the third activity we set the girls a 60 minute innovation challenge: come up with an innovative idea, outline a prototype and do a 1-minute elevator pitch to everyone in the big lecture theatre at the end of the day. We were all amazed with the creativity, imagination and truly innovative ideas the girls came up with – we even noted some down some for our own work! We covered a wide spectrum of ideas from robots organising your daily schedule at home, medical robots for elderly, smart microwaves to self-learning hair salons.

The winning team at Daresbury invented “Reflect and Select”, a smart mirror in which you can try on online shopping items virtually in the mirror and purchase with one click – who would not buy into that idea? The winning team at RAL introduced a hovering wheel chair to allow disabled people a new found freedom in movement, a wonderful example for “out-of-the-box” thinking!

Throughout the day, the positive spirit and excitement caught everyone, volunteers, teachers and girls. Our IBM staff “had a blast working with the girls, such an inspiring crowd!” and said “the RAL event was excellent and even I felt inspired by all the science and technology on-site.” Teachers confirmed that “it was a great day and the girls enjoyed it; they were clearly talking more about the subject on the way home than going” and Dianne Kennedy from St. John Plessington High wrote to us after the event: “Thank you for the really enjoyable day.  The pupils really enjoyed the experience, hopefully this will encourage them to think about choosing a STEM subject” and Ruth Harrison from Lowton High School thought:

“the balance was right, it was wonderful to see young, vibrant, bright women inspiring our girls to think about a career in STEM and raise their aspirations –  whatever their academic ability.”

This feedback was also confirmed by the numbers as 77% (DL) / 80%(RAL) girls said they now want to find out more about STEM when they get home. We further asked whether the event made them more likely to consider choosing a science/technology degree at university or for an apprenticeship, with 53% (DL) / 63% (RAL) confirming this to be more encouraged and 32% (DL) / 19% (RAL) considering this as a career choice anyway.

We were so pleased with the feedback received from teachers and girls and are keen to plan the next event to inspire even more young pupils to join us in a truly rewarding career choice!

Last but not least, a big shout out for the IBMers Houda Achouri, Kashif Taj, Georgia Prosser, Jenni Marr and STFC’s Sophy Palmer, Phill Day and Wendy Cotterill to help make the event possible and the helpers on the day: Georgia Clarkson, Malgorzata Zimon, Blair Edwards, Martyn Spink, Lan Hoang, Flaviu Cipcigan, Anna Paola Carrieri, Dave Cable, Navatha Tirungari, Rob Allan, Roger Downing, Laura Johnston, Holly Halford, Gemma Reed, Julia Game, Shannon Wilson, Olivia O’Sullivan, Lisa Whimperley, Peter Kane, Greg Corbett, Tom Dack, Jeremy Spencer, Louise Davies, Tom Byrne, Chris Oliver, Jacob Ward, Mostafa Nabi, Sarah James, Rosie Davies, Kate Winfield, Eilidh Southren, Kyle Birtwell, Lauren Mowberry, Vicky Stowell, Dave Wilsher, Manny Olaiya, Preeti Kaur, and Ffion Argent.

Continue reading “Inspiration, ideas and innovation: Girls in Tech outreach event”

Shaping IT Service Management at The Hartree Centre: Introduction

The first in a series of blog posts from Dave Cable, Head of Service Operations here at The Hartree Centre gives us a gentle introduction in to the world of IT Service Management. Look out for future posts covering service operationservice design, and continual service improvement.

What is IT Service Management?

IT Service Management (ITSM) is the proper design, governance and operation of IT-related services to meet agreed customer needs within predictable cost and efficiency bounds.  It brings together policies, processes and people with the common goal of service delivery and continuous improvement.

Why is it important?

Any IT service provider needs a clear idea of what it is they are trying to deliver and to whom.  The provider also needs to understand the costs of providing services alongside any financial returns.  ITSM provides a mechanism for businesses to be able to meet these requirements.

Continue reading “Shaping IT Service Management at The Hartree Centre: Introduction”

From a Computing GCSE to being Deputy Director

“Life is like a large pond, you are surrounded by lilypads and depending on your capabilities and circumstances you have to pick the next one to step onto.”

When I was younger, growing up in Wigan I was mainly interested in three things: football, computers and radio control cars. At school, I decided to study A Levels in maths, physics and chemistry and then went off to study chemistry at the University of Leeds with no fixed idea of what I wanted to do or where I was going afterwards.

After a period of unemployment, I was lucky enough to get a job as a Research Chemist with Crosfield, a Unilever company at the time. This involved working with Crosfield silica to remove protein from beer, essentially increasing the shelf-life of the product. To me, this was great, I was a beer scientist at the age of 21! I enjoyed the challenge of working on new formulations and eventually discovered a way of improving the shelf-life of beer using 50-70% less material than previous methods. At first, the brewers we worked with did not seem to buy in to the idea so the sales staff invited me out with them to explain the process to our customers. That was my first taste of sales and I really enjoyed it so I started to try to go out with the sales team as much as I could.

My next ‘career leap’ was in to telesales and this turned out to be a terrible idea as it really did not suit the way I liked to work and how I liked to develop customer relationships and insight. From there, I went to work for Dionex in a regional sales role with a remit for selling chromatography columns that separate chemical components. It was this position that helped me to recognise that I was actually quite good at sales and learned an important point:

“people do not just buy kit, they buy answers to the problems they want to solve.”

This led me back to my interest in computing where I taught myself how to use a macro-based scripting process that increased the efficiency of the sales process, helping me to match solutions to customer problems.

Continue reading “From a Computing GCSE to being Deputy Director”

Shaping the Northern Powerhouse

Delegates attending APM Project Management Conference 2016.
Image credit: APM

The Association for Project Management (APM) recently held their first Manchester based conference, and the Northern Powerhouse initiative by UK Government was their key theme. Claire Trinder and Lisa Booth from our Programme Management Office attended the event, and it got them thinking about where the Hartree Centre fits in.

“If the Northern Powerhouse were a country, it would be amongst the biggest economies in Europe. If we can make this region an economic powerhouse, the whole of the UK will benefit.”

Phillip Hammond, Chancellor of the Exchequer

It sounds simple enough when you put it like that, but as we discovered at the APM conference, there’s a lot more to unlocking the benefits of the Northern Powerhouse than meets the eye.

The event, held in early December 2016, zeroed in on the developments in infrastructure, communication and technology projects that are being designed to re-balance the UK economy in line with the government’s Northern Powerhouse vision laid out in its strategy document. In summary, the Northern Powerhouse is a vision for a more joined up region in which northern towns and cities work collaboratively, sharing skills and resources to unlock the economic potential of the area.

Continue reading “Shaping the Northern Powerhouse”

Bringing big data to life | TechUK’s Big Data in Action Roadshow comes to Manchester

http://www.dreamstime.com/royalty-free-stock-images-information-exchange-image9317559
http://www.dreamstime.com/royalty-free-stock-images-information-exchange-image9317559

Last week, the Hartree Centre sponsored TechUK’s Big Data in Action Roadshow in Manchester, held as part of a series of events across the UK to demonstrate the tools and technologies available for businesses to use, explore and get value from their data. Read on to find out how the day unfolded. Continue reading “Bringing big data to life | TechUK’s Big Data in Action Roadshow comes to Manchester”

An experiment, of sorts….. improving my health and well-being in the workplace

Dawn Geatches

Dawn Geatches, Project Scientist at the Hartree Centre, has been actively trying to improve her health in the workplace. Here, she shares her experience:

Recently I have been carrying out an experiment. Given that I work in science at STFC and have the pleasure of working on some very exciting Hartree Centre projects, you might rightly say “So what? You’re a scientist and they do that!” Continue reading “An experiment, of sorts….. improving my health and well-being in the workplace”

Through the gears: boosting car industry competitiveness

 

The visualisation facilities at the Hartree Centre have been used to help car manufacturers reduce time and money from their innovation processes

Now that the summer break is pretty much over (what was that I hear some of you shout?), I thought it was time for us to publish another post on here. In this post I touch a little on the automotive industry.

The automotive industry is one of those sectors that countries tend to use as a barometer of their overall industrial and economic performance. In the UK, the sector enjoyed a pretty buoyant 2015 all things considered. Continue reading “Through the gears: boosting car industry competitiveness”