Two Trinity scientists secure awards from the Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC)

12 September 2020

Ireland’s High-Performance Computing authority announced on, Friday September 11, the details of seven academic projects which will be supported by its new Academic Flagship Programme. Two of the seven projects were awarded to Trinity’s School of Physics.

The Academic Flagship Programme will operate under the EuroHPC Competency Centre for Ireland which ICHEC recently launched. It is one of 33 similar centres across Europe which form the ambitious EuroHPC programme. The two year Academic Flagship Programme aims to increase Irish competitiveness in the European supercomputing landscape. The successful projects were selected from a competitive call which received 13 proposals from researchers distributed across 17 universities/institutes across Ireland, UK, Spain, France, Germany, Denmark, Japan and the USA.

Commenting on the success, Prof. Stefano Sanvito, AMBER, Director or CRANN and School of Physics explains his project, Development of a flexible and modularized first-principles machine-learning infrastructure for automatic new materials discovery – application to high-entropy alloys,
“Our project aims at establishing an automatic workflow for materials discovery that will integrate machine learning/artificial intelligence methods with state-of-the-art electronic structure theory. The collaboration with ICHEC computational scientists will allow us to implement such program on massively parallel computational infrastructures, and eventually on the peta-scale facilities that will be soon available in Europe. Our ambition is to be able to map the enormous chemical and structural space available to high-entropy alloys, in the search for ideal compounds for a number of applications. These include high-performance metallurgy, aereospace, precision mechanics and catalysis.”

Prof. John Goold at Trinity’s School of Physics secured an award for his project “Kernel polynomial methods for quantum spin chains”; explaining the project, Prof. Goold commented:

“From a scientific perspective we are interested in a century old fundamental question: how does thermodynamics and thermal behaviour emerge from the unitary dynamics of isolated quantum dynamics. This requires the simulation of complex quantum dynamics for both large systems and long times without any of the usual approximation such as mean field etc. This requires exponential computational resources. Although quantum simulators are currently on the horizon, we will use this support to develop codes on the largest of European computational facilities.”

Commenting on the significance of Euro-HPC Programme for Ireland, J-C Desplat Director, ICHEC said;

“High-Performance Computing is a strategic resource for Europe’s future for academia and business. Coming technology changes will drive competitiveness and Europe is aware that supercomputing is fundamental to this. Ireland, through ICHEC, will gain access for researchers and SMEs to a coordinated, integrated, high level of expertise across Europe in high-performance computing and related disciplines for science and industry, such as high-performance data analytics, classical simulation, and artificial intelligence.”