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A computer program, CASTEP, has been developed to use quantum mechanics to calculate the structure and properties of materials. The code is distributed commercially via Accelrys Inc. with sales, for example, in the automotive, electronics and pharmaceutical industries in excess of £1m per year since 1998, accelerating to over £2.5m per year recently and total sales (late 2012) exceeding $30m. Commercial applications include designing new battery materials and electrodes to improve the performance of electric cars (Toyota), integrating organic electronic materials for light-weight flexible displays (Sony), and developing new catalysts for hydrogen-powered fuel cells (Johnson-Matthey).
Durham researcher, Prof Stewart Clark, is one of the six original co-developers of the Castep software package which calculates the electronic, physical and chemical properties of materials from first principles. Castep was written to solve a variety of research problems from semiconductor devices and liquid crystal displays, to the behaviour of Earth minerals under very high pressure, molecular dynamics and biological systems. The software package was commercialised for use in industry under license by Accelrys Inc., where it is bought and used by ~1000 high-tech companies for development of new materials in chemical, pharmaceutical, auto and jet engine manufacturing industries. Total sales revenue for Accelerys from the Castep code is in excess of $30M.
The High Performance Computing (HPC) application code HELIUM, developed at Queen's University Belfast to assist the development of attosecond technology, has impacted on the provision of public services through guiding procurement and acceptance testing of the high-performance computer facility HECToR. This facility was funded by UK Government with a total expenditure of £113M during 2007 - 2013. The HELIUM code was used for procurement and acceptance testing for the initial HECToR service in 2007 (Phase 1, 11k cores), and its upgrades in 2009 (Phase 2a, 22k cores), 2010 (Phase 2b, 44k cores) and 2011 (Phase 3, 90k cores). The HELIUM code was particularly invaluable in demonstrating that the Phase 2b and Phase 3 systems perform correctly at pre-agreed performance levels, since this code can be adapted to run for several hours over >80k cores.
A new company, Geomerics, was created as a spin-out from the Cavendish Laboratory. Geomerics now employs 22 full time staff, with offices in Cambridge, UK and Vancouver, Canada. Geomerics has pioneered a new business sector in selling lighting middleware technology, based on Cambridge research, to games developers. Customers include Electronic Arts, Square Enix and Take 2 (three of the five largest publishers) and licenses have been sold in Europe, North America, Japan and Korea. In 2011 the first game released using Geomerics software, Battlefield 3, became the fastest selling game in Electronic Arts' history, having sold nearly 20M copies.
High Performance Computing (HPC) is a key element in our research. The Particle Physics Group has accumulated expertise in the development and optimisation of coding paradigms for specific supercomputer hardware. Our codes are deployed on supercomputers around the world, producing high-profile research results. We have developed a simulation environment, BSMBench, that is, on the one hand, flexible enough to run on major supercomputer platforms and, on the other hand, pushes supercomputers to their limits. These codes are used by IBM and Fujitsu Siemens for benchmarking their large installations and mainframes. The third party company BSMBench Ltd has commercialised the usage of our codes for analysing and optimising HPC systems of small and medium-sized enterprises.
Research by Prof Sollich and collaborators has led to new ways of looking at the problem of understanding the phase behaviour (phase transitions like freezing and melting, or demixing in oil-water mixtures) of systems which are polydisperse in that they contain an effectively infinite number of different particle species. This is the situation with many industrially important materials: e.g. in emulsion paint, the colloidal paint particles have an essentially continuous spread of diameters. Beyond conceptual progress, the research has resulted in efficient numerical algorithms for predicting phase equilibria. Specifically, it has led to significant savings in industrial research processes and thus has had both economic impact and impact on practitioners and professional services.
DualEELS™ is a recent advance in Electron Energy Loss Spectroscopy (EELS) made possible by a successful collaboration between the University of Glasgow and Gatan, the world leader in electron spectroscopy systems for electron microscopy. The resulting Gatan GIF QUANTUM® and the ENFINIUM® electron microscope products, incorporating the novel DualEELS™ concept pioneered in Glasgow, have been a commercial success. Between the launch in 2009 and the end of 2011, 145 systems have been delivered to universities, research institutes and industry at a total market value of over US$7.5M. The market penetration of the DualEELS™ technique has been very high. In 2012, DualEELS™ units were delivered with over 70% of all GIF/EELS systems sold. These systems are used routinely for R&D, quality control and failure analysis in firms such as AMD, Intel and Samsung, and for development of the advanced materials and devices key to modern society in a wide range of industrial sectors.
Approximately 70% of the continental margins contain significant volcanic flows, created when continents broke apart. Because large quantities of hydrocarbons may be trapped in sediments beneath the lava flows the ability to image through the basalt layers is of tremendous commercial value. However, these lava flows impede conventional seismic imaging by scattering energy, thus blocking the view of what lies beneath. Professor White and his team developed a technique, based on work in the 1990's, for imaging through the lava flows which differs radically from the conventional commercial approach. Professor White's technique has been widely adopted by the oil industry and has had a dramatic global impact, particularly for companies expanding exploration into deeper waters, including the north-west margin of Europe, the South American coast, particularly off Brazil and the continental margins of India. This approach has now become the norm having been adopted by oil companies globally.
Grid computing research conducted by the High Energy Physics (HEP) Group at the University of Cambridge, Department of Physics has enabled software company IMENSE to develop and commercialise a range of content based image recognition products. The research gained substantial media interest and was featured at the BA Festival of Science 2008.
Prof. White's research, and the associated computer algorithms he has developed,have played a key role in decision-making in the petroleum industry, particularly as the search for new resources has moved into increasingly hostile and remote regions on deep-water continental margins, where the uncertainty of exploration involves multi- million pound risks. The key to reducing the geological element of that risk is a detailed understanding of the structure and evolution of the thinned crust and lithosphere that underlie these margins. Prof. White's insights, algorithms and methodology are used by hydrocarbon companies, in particular BP Exploration, to predict hydrocarbon potential and to gain access to exploration acreage.