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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.
CASTEP is a parameter-free and predictive quantum mechanical atomistic simulation code developed by Professor Payne in the Department of Physics at the University of Cambridge. CASTEP has been sold commercially by Accelrys since 1995, with more than 800 industrial customers using the package. As part of Accelrys' Materials Studio, it can be used by non-experts to determine a wide range of physical and chemical properties of materials. Companies can thus perform `virtual experiments' using CASTEP. As quantum mechanical simulations can be cheaper and more flexible than experiments, CASTEP invariably reduces costs and accelerates product development.
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.
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.
Impact: The underpinning research resulted in an innovative Worst-Case Execution time (WCET) analysis technology now called RapiTime, which was transferred to industry via a spin-out company, Rapita Systems Ltd. The technology enables companies in the aerospace and automotive industries to reduce the time and cost required to obtain confidence in the timing correctness of the systems they develop. The RapiTime technology has global reach having been deployed on major aerospace and automotive projects in the UK, Europe, Brazil, India, China, and the USA. Key customers include leading aerospace companies such as: [text removed for publication]; as well as major automotive suppliers: [text removed for publication]. Since 2008, Rapita has won export orders to China worth over [text removed for publication]. From 2008/9 to 2011/12, the company's annual revenues have more than doubled from [text removed for publication] to over [text removed for publication]. As of August 2013, Rapita employs [text removed for publication] people at its offices in York and Cambridge.
As a result of collaborative commissioned research, the lead developers of a major atmospheric research and operational weather forecasting model have changed their approach to quality assuring model source code. Drawing directly on the research findings, the lead developer has taken the decision to adopt a new approach to the correction of inconsistencies and inefficiencies in source code and to alter the software build procedure to be followed by a large model development community. An additional impact, in the form of improved business competiveness, is felt by a British software and consultancy company, which has been able to enhance a key tool used in their quality assurance and platform migration work with a global client base.
Although the world will have some time to wait until the full impact of fusion energy is realised, there is substantial non-academic impact from plasma science on the design of ITER. This €13Bn+ international facility, under construction in France, is designed to demonstrate the technical feasibility of fusion energy. Our research on plasma eruptions (like mini solar flares), identified the need to protect ITER plasma facing components from large, localised thermal loads. In addition, the antennas for radio-frequency heating of ITER plasmas needed to be designed to take account of the filamentary density structures that we predicted to be associated with these eruptions.
This case study describes the development, application and commercialisation of an open source tool, BSMBench that enables supercomputer vendors and computing centres to benchmark their system's performance. It comprehensively informs the design and testing of new computing architectures well beyond other benchmarking tools on the market, such as Linpack.
The significance of our code is that, unlike other benchmarking tools, it interpolates from a communication- to a computation-dominated regime simply by varying the (physics) parameters in the code, thus providing a perfect benchmark suite to test the response of modern multi-CPU systems along this axis. The impact of this work has great reach: a start-up company, BSMbench Ltd, has been founded to develop and commercialise the software; adopters have included IBM - one of the giants of the supercomputer world (where it uncovered errors in their compilers); it has been deployed by Fujitsu to validate its systems, by HPC Wales, a multi-site, commercially focussed national computer centre and by Transtec, an HPC company employing over 150 staff; and tutorial articles about BSMBench have appeared in magazines such as Linux Format.
This software tool spawned from our research into "Beyond the Standard Model" (BSM) physics which aims to understand the Higgs mechanism in particle physics at a fundamental level. This involved simulating quantum field theories using bespoke code on some of the fastest supercomputers on the planet.
The impact of the research is evident in two areas of software engineering practice connected through software fault-proneness: (i) improper use of `design patterns', recognised reusable templates for how to design code; and (ii) the real benefits of `refactoring', a technique whereby code is intentionally changed by a developer to improve its efficiency and/or make it easier to read. Application of the research findings has led to significant impacts on software development at BancTec Ltd., a medium-sized, international IT company which, as a result, has changed its practices, challenging established approaches in industrial IT. The research has had, and continues to have, direct and sustained impact at BancTec through changed commercial practice and raised awareness of internal standards; this has led to increased training of developers and rollout of new internal software development standards in the UK and India, and as a template world-wide for 2,000 employees in 50 countries.