From our Director

I hope that as you leaf through this issue of EPCC News you’ll see what a broad range of activities EPCC is involved in. We’re going through one of our expansion phases with lots of new opportunities presenting themselves – many but not all related to the Edinburgh & SE Scotland City Region Deal.

A key part of this is our office move in August – the first time we’ve done this in 28 years. We’re looking forward to taking possession of our floor in the new “Bayes Centre for Data Science and Technology”, located beside the Informatics Forum in central Edinburgh.

We all have many memories of the James Clerk Maxwell Building – I first came to the building in 1989 and, apart from a few summers at CERN during my PhD, it’s been my workplace for almost 30 years. We all have many memories of key EPCC “moments” too. It will be strange to leave but our new location presents enormous opportunities for EPCC and we’re looking forward to the move… but not to clearing out our offices!

By the time you read this I very much hope the completion of the City Deal negotiation will have been announced. While waiting for this to happen we have not been idle – a strong set of initial projects is already in preparation. At the same time, Japan and the USA have spoken more clearly about the delivery timelines for their first exascale systems – 2021–2022. I wonder when the UK will be farsighted enough to invest in its own exascale system?

Mark Parsons, EPCC Director m.parsons@epcc.ed.ac.uk