EPSRC has a twin track to supporting large-scale software development for scientific applications. Firstly there are the CCPs and HPCI Consortia, the latter were founded in 1995 when the first Cray T3E was installed at EPCC. Secondly there is the UK High End Computing Collaboration. UKHEC is grant funded with five staff members distributed between Daresbury Laboratory and the Universities of Edinburgh and Manchester. They work closely with the DisCo Programme team at Daresbury, for instance in organising the 11th Daresbury Machine Evaluation Workshop (22-24th November 2000) and the Summer School on Linux for HPC (held in Manchester 4-15th September 2000). Material from both these events is now available on CD-ROM or can be obtained from the DisCo Web site at http://www.cse.clrc.ac.uk/Activity/DisCo.

In its first year, UKHEC has run several seminars and workshops, given courses on "Software Development" and "Programming Tools" and produced reports as follows:

• Reports:
  • Grid-based Computing for Scientific Applications
  • Grid-based High Performance Computing
  • The UK HEC Grid: state of the art and next steps
  • Programming models for parallel Java Applications
  • Design and Building a Beowulf System
  • Software Engineering and Code Development Tools
  • Data Management and Parallel I/O (in draft)
  • Mixed-mode Programming
  • Benchmarking (in presentation format)
  • A Scientific User's Guide to the Tera Architecture
  • Visualisation for HEC
  • Survey of Virtual Reality Technologies
• Seminars:
  • Grid-based Computing
  • Java for HEC
  • Annual UKHEC Seminar
• Workshops:
  • The Computational Grid
  • Object-oriented Programming
  • Visualisation for HPC

A magazine summarising this work is produced every 6 months. Further information and copies of material to down load can be found on the web site at http://www.ukhec.ac.uk.

Topics which will receive our attention this year include:

• monitoring new hardware, software and languages,
• code development, maintenance and porting
• quality assurance of large codes
• evaluate and disseminate tools
• training and mentoring PDRAs
• the computational Grid
• ASCI-class cluster technology