For a decade, High Performance Computing (HPC) has been a key development area of the Computer Centre for facilitating technology innovations and leading-edge researches in the University. Since the first scalable parallel HPC system was first installed in 1993, we have witnessed many significant research achievements of our HPC users. Throughout these ten years, over 700 staff and students users have made use of our Centre's HPC facilities for their research and academic studies.
Many researchers now rely on the use of high-speed computation processing for enabling their research work to unveil the mysteries and discover new knowledge of different natural and social phenomena, to invent advanced technologies and to develop innovative solutions for betterment of people's daily life. In this regard, we are very grateful to receive continuous support from the University, which has enabled the Computer Centre to acquire a new HPC cluster system recently to enhance the central HPC facilities to meet the intensive computation needs for a growing number of research projects undertaken by our professors and research students. The HPC cluster that we have just launched is currently the fastest computer in Hong Kong. It boasts a theoretical peak speed (Rpeak) of 1,433.6 GFLOPS (billions of floating point operations per second) and an achieved LINPACK benchmark speed (Rmax) of 638.8 GFLOPS. It is ranked 240 on the latest TOP500 list of the fastest supercomputers in the world.
The use of HPC at the University has expanded to include an increasing number of disciplines and applications. Apart from a wide range of scientific researches in molecular physics, quantum chemistry and mathematics, HPC has been used by our dentistry and engineering colleagues to research on a wide range of problems that are closely related to our daily life. Statistics and actuarial science is another discipline in which an increasing number of researchers are extensively utilizing the central HPC facilities to carry out large-scale statistical simulations and studies of complex statistical problems that are of great significance to our society.
This booklet is a summary version of our report which highlights recent researches of the University that have utilized HPC. You can refer to the full version of the report that can be read from the associated CD-ROM or the web site at http://www.its.hku.hk/research/events/hpcpower for more details about the researchers, the significance of the projects and the associated research findings.
At the time when our new HPC cluster is launched, I am particularly encouraged to see that the central HPC facilities of the Computer Centre have facilitated so many researchers in their work leading to the many remarkable results reported. I congratulate them for their accomplishments, and would like to thank them for providing us the valuable information about their projects, without which the publication of this booklet would not be possible.