Zettascale Systems for Urgent Computing

Large-scale parallel simulation and modeling are not only crucial for research and scientific exploration, these applications play an increasingly integral role in guiding our responses to crises. High-performance computing can aid decision-making following natural disasters, accidents and climate-related weather events.

During the recent Covid-19 pandemic, high-performance computing resources at the University of Cambridge were rapidly deployed in order to provide epidemiological modeling of communicable disease transmission in real time. But the recent pandemic has also indicated the limitations of traditional supercomputing: these systems are too inflexible and difficult to integrate into the IT environments of government and emergency services.