Swansea Academy of Advanced Computing
Academi Uwch Gyfrifiadureg Abertawe

About SA2C

Swansea Academy of Advanced Computing (SA2C) is an Academic Academy that supports research making use of High-Performance Computing (HPC) and other advanced computing technologies.

We do this in a number of ways. Firstly, we have a team of Research Software Engineers (RSEs) dedicated to enabling you to run your software on HPC, and to make it run faster. Secondly, we manage the University's HPC resources, including hosting clusters in our datacentres.

About the RSEs

The RSE team at SA2C can help with a variety of aspects of utilising HPC. Some examples include:

• Grant application preparation: If you are applying for a grant for a project that will require HPC, and you need to evidence that your software is ready to run on it, we can run scaling tests and provide a detailed benchmark report to evidence your application. If your application is not yet ready to run on HPC, we can assist with the process of porting the application so it will.
• Onboarding: If you have computational work that is slow enough to be a barrier to the research outputs when run on your desktop, but don't know where to start moving to HPC, talk to us and we can provide assistance and guidance with this process. Frequently this is not as difficult or daunting a task as it might seem!
• Performance tuning: If you already have applications making use of HPC that you need to run faster, we can work with you to profile and tune your application's performance to make most efficient use of the available hardware. Since starting in October, the team has already delivered increases in throughput of between 10 and 200% on applications we have worked on.

If you are interested in high-performance or technical computing, we also run a technical seminar series, in which we discuss a wide range of technically-oriented topics.

About Supercomputing Wales

Supercomputing Wales is a project funded by the ERDF through WEFO to increase the research output of Wales through an investment in HPC. This includes funding new clusters in Cardiff and Swansea, and hiring RSE teams in Aberystwyth, Bangor, Cardiff, and Swansea. Swansea's component of the project is delivered by SA2C.

New hardware is currenly nearing the end of the procurement process and will be installed in the coming months.

Contact

If you would like to know more about SA2C or HPC, would like to access the University's HPC hardware resources, or need assistance from the RSE team with using the available equipment or improving the performance of your applications, please don't hesitate to contact us via one of the following means:

• E-mail us: sa2c-support@swansea.ac.uk
• Visit a SA2C Drop-in Code Clinic