With the establishment of seven PhD studentships in computational science to be undertaken in Welsh universities, the first stages of a new supercomputing-based research collaboration have been jointly announced by Fujitsu and HPC Wales. Forming part of a wider strategic partnership between the two organisations, the studentships are designed to promote the uptake of high-performance computing (HPC) in Welsh industries in areas of priority to the Welsh Government. The successful projects will utilise the HPC infrastructure of HPC Wales, powered by Fujitsu Primergy clusters.
Studentship projects will also have access to collaboration with researchers and HPC specialists from Fujitsu Laboratories of Europe and the Technical Computing Solutions Unit of Fujitsu. The topic areas fall within the categories of energy and the environment, advanced materials and manufacturing, and life sciences. Projects will include the study of the consequences of any future climate change on the stability of the polar ice sheets and on global sea level; the development of the second generation of DNA sequencing devices that can produce fully-sequenced genomes extremely rapidly and at low cost; and simulations to predict the topography and heat flow contributions from the Earth’s mantle, which will be of value to the oil and gas industry. A further 13 studentships are expected to be announced in July 2012 and July 2013.
