Keynote speakers

Richard Lawrence

IT-Fellow - Supercomputing, Met Office

Modelling clouds in the cloud

Abstract: The Met Office has signed a multimillion-pound agreement with Microsoft to provide a world-leading supercomputing capability that will take weather and climate forecasting to the next level.

In his talk, Richard will explain how the government was convinced to invest a significant amount of money in a world changing IT upgrade.

• Understand the workings of the Met Office and how it makes use of Supercomputers
  
• Learn how government spent £1bn on supercomputing
  
• Gain insight into how you move 1 petabyte of data a day
  

Short biography: Specialising in supercomputing architecture, Richard is accountable for the technical design, implementation, and future direction of one of the world’s largest supercomputers dedicated to weather and climate research.

As the programme architect for the Met Office’s Supercomputer 2020+ programme, he led the work on the Data Centre, Connectivity and Scientific Compute Environment packages and oversaw the requirement capture and design of the Active Data Archive expected to handle 1PB of data a day with a capacity of ~4 Exabytes.

Richard holds a MEng in Software Engineering at Aberystwyth University and is a Chartered Engineer and Chartered IT Professional.

Laura Parry

Senior HPC + AI Senior Specialist

Future development of the Azure HPC platform, applications and intelligent services

Abstract: Researchers and scientists can now, more than ever, more accurately simulate, predict and analyse a broad range of topics – from extreme weather events to population health.

Some of these discoveries can help inform government policy and support strategies that help mitigate and address potentially severe impacts on our planet and its inhabitants.

Microsoft Azure provides a differentiated cloud-HPC platform with a wealth of applications, intelligent services, focused collaborations and technical support to help address some of these big challenges: but what does the future cloud platform look like? What are the opportunities – and the research challenges?