WIREDGOV

Finance Minister Jane Hutt yesterday visited an EU-funded project helping universities and businesses access supercomputing facilities to drive forward research and achieve commercial success.

High Performance Computing Wales, (HPC) Wales, is part-funded by some £25 million through the Welsh Government, including over £19.5m from the European Regional Development Fund. The venture is committed to boosting the Welsh economy by providing academic researchers and businesses with some of the most advanced computing technology in the world.

Host to the UK’s largest distributed supercomputing network, HPC Wales provides businesses and researchers with local access to world-class technology, as well as the support and training necessary to fully exploit it.

Its two hubs, in Swansea and Cardiff, are supplied with the latest Fujitsu Primergy equipment with Intel Sandy Bridge processors, reaching a total capacity of over 17,000 cores. The network boasts a peak processing performance of almost 320 TFlops – meaning that it is capable of running 320 trillion operations per second.

During her visit to the Swansea Hub at the Dylan Thomas Centre, Finance Minister Jane Hutt said:

"I am pleased to see how EU Funds are being utilised to benefit businesses and our academic institutions. It is vital we support industry – both small and larger companies - in order to develop new intellectual property, products and services which can help them compete globally and win new business.

"So far, EU projects have helped 153,000 individuals to gain qualifications and some 51,900 have been helped into work. In addition, some 21,300 jobs and nearly 6,700 enterprises have been created."

HPC Wales has already assisted over 100 enterprises, with 48 collaborative projects underway and many more in the pipeline.

One business who hopes to benefit from HPC Wales is Swansea-based We Predict. Established in 2009, We Predict assists customers to address critical business problems using predictive analytics.

We Predict's core market is the automotive sector and is currently on the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) short list for automotive innovation. It provides a data analytics service, which forecasts component failures in cars, trucks and off road vehicles enabling the creation of preventative solutions to avoid these failures.

We Predict is now expanding its business into the healthcare sector. To achieve this, the firm is developing a research proposal in conjunction with HPC Wales.

HPC Wales hopes to support We Predict’s Health project to forecast patients’ health and healthcare usage by by providing access to the vast and complex Secure Anonymised Information Linkage (SAIL) databank, which is hosted in HPC.  A team of mathematicians, statisticians, computer scientists and a medical doctor plan to develop health tools and techniques to improve patient experience, planning and health outcomes.

Dr Kerry Bailey, Health Lead at We Predict, said:

"The NHS collects a large amount of data.  Our research will be examining commonly collected primary care data to develop a model on the likelihood of individuals having an emergency admission to hospital.

"For example, in asthma patients, up to three in four emergency admissions could be avoided by identifying patients most at risk early and putting preventative strategies in place. We hope this project will result in a better quality of life for patients, as well as easing the strain on the NHS.

"Our research is dependent on gaining approval from the SAIL Information Governance Review Panel for access to the large volumes of data in the SAIL database and will not be possible the without support of High Performance Computing (HPC) Wales."

David Craddock, Chief Executive Officer of HPC Wales, added:

"We are delighted to welcome the Finance Minister to our Swansea hub and I hope she is impressed by the facilities on offer here.

"It is also great to hear of the important research being supported by HPC Wales. We Predict’s innovative research has the potential to make a significant positive difference to the NHS.

"A growing number of SMEs are now becoming aware that access to supercomputing technology can help them attain a competitive advantage and our aim is to train and support them to get the most benefits from the technology."

HPC Wales was established in partnership with the Universities of Aberystwyth, Bangor, Cardiff, South Wales, Swansea and the University of Wales. To find out more visit: www.hpcwales.co.uk