HPC and Big Data Technologies for Global Systems

HiDALGO – HPC and Big Data Technologies for Global Systems – is a Europen project funded by the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme of the European Union. The project is carried out by 13 institutions from seven countries.

Understanding major global challenges as well as their underlying parameters is a vital issue in our modern world. Various examples, such as health care, the transition of green technologies or the evolution of the global climate up to hazards and stress tests for the financial sector demonstrate the complexity of the involved simulation systems. This high level of complexity becomes even more evident in the case of coupled systems: the problem statements and their corresponding parameters depend on each other, which results in very involved interconnected simulations.

Although the process of bringing together the different aspects has already started within the Centre of Excellence for Global Systems Science (CoeGSS), the importance of assisted decision making by addressing global, multi-dimensional problems is more important than ever.

To predict the impact of global decisions with their dependencies, we need an accurate problem representation and a systemic analysis. To achieve this, HiDALGO enables highly accurate simulations, data analytics and data visualisation, and also provides knowledge on how to integrate the various workflows as well as the corresponding data.

Meet the Principal Investigator(s) for the project

Dr Derek Groen - I am a Lecturer in Simulation and Modelling at Brunel University. I'm also an Emeritus Fellow for the EPSRC-funded 2020 Science Network, a Fellow of the Software Sustainability Institute, and a Visiting Lecturer at the Centre for Computational Science at University College London. I completed an MSc in Grid Computing at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) in 2006, and a PhD in Computational Astrophysics both at the UvA and Leiden University in November 2010. After my PhD I worked as a post-doctoral researcher on EU projects about distributed multiscale computing (MAPPER) and high-performance computing towards the Exascale (CRESTA). I received a 1-year position as a Fellow of 2020 Science in January 2015, and funded myself for two months through an EPSRC eCSE to work on new approaches for domain decomposition. I joined Brunel University in September 2015 to become a Lecturer and I currently collaborate in the EU ComPat project about multiscale computing towards the Exascale. I have published >20 peer-reviewed journal papers in venues such as IEEE Computer, IEEE CiSE, Journal of Computational Science, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A., Physics Review E., the Astrophysical Journal and eLife. In addition, I was second author of the first ever feature article in Advanced Materials, which was on multiscale modelling of clay-polymer nanocomposites and received news coverage from the Daily Telegraph and the BBC. I currently run Science Hackathons to efficiently establish new interdisciplinary collaborations.

Related Research Group(s)

Computer Science for Social Good - Our group works with partners in the Global South to lead and promote interdisciplinary research in the field of computer science and social good. We focus on investigating and developing new ways and innovative technologies to address challenging socio-economic problems.

Modelling and Simulation - Investigating how modelling and simulation can be supported by research into high-performance computing, e-infrastructures, cyberinfrastructures, cloud computing and web-based simulation.

Project last modified 28/03/2022