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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.
Professor Peter Giblin (Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Liverpool), together with collaborators, used methods from singularity theory to develop an approach for recovering 3-d information from 2-d images, such as photos. In the past decade, these have been implemented and built upon by software engineers, leading to significant cultural, economic and societal impacts. These include the creation of an innovative 25m high sculpture of the human body in the Netherlands by the sculptor Antony Gormley and the virtual modelling of clothing on online clothing websites such as Tesco's (Virtual Changing Room by Tesco/F&F). These have reached thousands of consumers worldwide and represent a significant commercial success for the company which developed the software.
Researchers in the Department of Mathematics at Swansea University have developed novel geometric methods for image processing, feature extraction and shape interrogation. The research has delivered commercial and clinical impact in a variety of settings, ranging from new water marking techniques to improve piracy detection in the film industry, to medical research investigating the replacement of traditional CT scans with safer MR scans. The research has also delivered an automatic feature and gap detection tool that has been successfully applied to aircraft data files provided by BAE Systems. A consultancy company is exploiting the methods and a licence for the commercialisation of the technology is in process.
We demonstrate a strong influence on the design of the read head used in the present state-of-the-art hard-disk drive (HDD) first produced commercially in 2008. This much improved read head, enabling disk storage density to increase by a factor of 5 to around 1 Tbit/in2, relies crucially on a magnetic tunnel junction with a MgO barrier whose huge tunneling magnetoresistance was predicted theoretically in a 2001 paper co-authored by Dr A. Umerski [1], the RA on one of our EPSRC-funded research grants. This prediction relied on techniques developed by us over many years, specifically in refs [2] and [3]. Such magnetic tunnel junctions are used in all computer HDDs manufactured today with predicted sales in 2012 amounting to more than $28 billion [section 5, source A].
This case study describes public engagement with the University of Oxford's research in Mathematical Physics via the popularization of science through the writings, public lectures and media appearances of Sir Roger Penrose. Published in 2010, Penrose's book Cycles of Time deals directly with the research contributions and has reached broad audiences via books, public lectures, TV appearances, and YouTube postings. The impact has been to engage large numbers of the public with modern theories of the origin of the universe in a mathematically non-trival way.
Advanced technologies for data visualisation and data mining, developed in the Unit in collaboration with national and international teams, are widely applied for development of medical services. In particular, a system for canine lymphoma diagnosis and monitoring developed with [text removed for publication] has now been successfully tested using clinical data from several veterinary clinics. The risk maps produced by our technology provide early diagnosis of lymphoma several weeks before the clinical symptoms develop. [text removed for publication] has estimated the treatment test, named [text removed for publication], developed with the Unit to add [text removed for publication] to the value of their business. Institute Curie (Paris), applies this data mapping technique and the software that has been developed jointly with Leicester in clinical projects.
Spatial decomposition methods have been extended to apply to spatial, scale, and temporal domains as a result of work at the Numerical and Applied Mathematics Research Unit (NAMU) at the University of Greenwich. This work has led to a numerical framework for tackling many nonlinear problems which have been key bottlenecks in software design and scientific computing. The work has benefitted the welding industry in the UK because these concepts are now embedded, with parallel computing, in the industry's modern welding design process software.
By using the progress of his own research over the course of a year as a major narrative theme, in Finding Moonshine Marcus du Sautoy provides the public with unique insight into the content and nature of his mathematical research programme. The success of the book, published in 2008, in conveying the essence of cutting edge research, in elementary terms, attracted the attention of broadcasters and policymakers and provided a platform from which du Sautoy has been able to expand his public engagement activities to reach millions of people through TV, radio, public lectures, social media and interactive projects. His three part documentary The Code stimulated over a million viewers to play Flash games based directly on mathematical concepts. The phenomenal success of his unique brand of engagement in awakening an interest in mathematics, in both young and old, has had a great impact on society.
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.
The Warner-McIntyre parametrization scheme for non-topographic atmospheric gravity waves, developed at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP), University of Cambridge, during the period from 1993 to 2004, has since 2010 been used by the UK Met Office in their operational models for seasonal forecasting and climate prediction .The parametrization is regarded by the Met Office as a vital part of improved representation of the stratosphere in those models, which in turn has been shown to lead to significant operational benefits.