Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC)

Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC)

Organisation type: 
Research institutions
Research organisations
Technology institutions
Network / partnership
Country: 
Ireland
Short name: 
ICHEC
Description: 

Overview
The Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC) provides companies efficient and cost-effective access to a complete portfolio of consulting services tailored to the needs of industry. This is achieved by providing a wide range of problem solving skill sets to answer increasingly more complex and challenging problems. A selection of client testimonials can be seen in our technology transfer video. This video outlines some of our range of activities and where ICHEC is addressing real business problems for Irish companies.

The mission of ICHEC is to solve real life business problems through the innovative use of technology.

ICHEC draws together the collective expertise of its staff. These include some of the very best programmers in the country, gifted mathematicians, and highly specialized staff covering most aspects of science and engineering. ICHEC has industry relevant expertise in a range of areas.

Examples of solution areas include:
##Analytics and Data Mining
##Cloud Computing
##Optimisation of Application Performance

ICHEC helps companies explore their data sets in novel ways so as to improve the profitability of their business. ICHEC can help restructure business processes and highlight links such as unique customer patterns or behaviours. Cloud computing can help businesses by utilising on-demand resources and computing infrastructures to deal with changeable application usage and demand patterns. ICHEC can improve the performance of business applications via a range of optimisations and the use of low-cost Graphical Processing Units.

Research & Collaborations
ICHEC both facilitates and participates in many research activities. The active involvement of ICHEC staff in scientific research is particularly important in bridging the gap between increasingly-powerful High-Performance Computing (HPC) facilities and researchers from different communities. We interact with many groups varying in size from individuals to large international collaborations.

The question was posed: Where does ICHEC fit into the research landscape in Ireland?
To begin to answer this question it is important to understand some terminology. In Ireland there are seven universities, 13 institutes of technology, colleges of education, independent and further educations centres and other national research institutions such as the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. Staff and students of these institutions can gain access to ICHEC general-purpose computing resources (such as Fionn) by submitting a project and are termed users. Projects differ by size, class, and domain, for example, a small "Discovery" (Class C) project in the chemistry domain with three users or a large multi-year "Grand Challenge" (Class A) project in engineering with 10 users. Further details of the Full National Service can be found here. Also, ICHEC has numerous computational scientists, staff, that support the users during the course of their project. So in summary there are users, project classes (A,B,C), project domains (Physics, Chemistry etc.) staff, Institutions, and ICHEC.
But to answer the original question, ICHEC stands at the heart of computational research in Ireland.