BCS Oxfordshire

The visit to ECMWF was scheduled to start with a short introduction about ECMWF, the Computer infrastructure used at ECMWF and a guided tour to the computer hall where all the supercomputers used by ECMWF reside.

Manfred Kloeppel started by introducing ECMWF as an independent intergovernmental organisation currently consisting of 37 Member and Co-Operating states. Established in 1975, ECMWF’s original goal defined by a Convention is to provide medium-range weather forecast to member and co-operating states twice daily and up to 10 days ahead. Each day, more than 300 million observational data elements are collected round the clock by a variety of Earth observing systems, including satellites, automatic and manned stations, aircrafts, ships, weather balloons and buoys. The production of a medium-range weather forecast (up to 15 days ahead) consists of four key requirements: a state-of-the-art data assimilation and analysis system, sophisticated weather prediction models, a constantly updated database of global weather observations and ultra-powerful computers.

ECMWF is not known to the general public because their key customers are the government’s environment department such as the Met Offices of Member and Co-Operating states. ECMWF will typically provide the numerical forecast data to the UK Met Office (or equivalent of the Member or Co-Operating states) and the UK Met Office will apply their weather forecast model to ECMWF’s data and then disseminate the results to the general public via news weather reports, Met Office website etc. Some Member or Co-Operating states do not have their own weather forecast model so they will then just circulate ECMWF’s numerical forecast in their appropriate medium.

Isabella Weger, Head of Computer Division spoke into detail about the need for high compute power to process complex data algorithms being applied to 300 million varieties of data from different sources to come up with the 15-day medium-range forecast.

ECMWF’s High Performance Computing Facility (HCPF) currently consists of two identical IBM Supercomputer 1600 clusters. Each one is based on 272 IBM pSeries p6-575 compute servers interconnected by a low latency high-speed network. The HPCFs have a ~17,400 total number of processes, 330 TFlops Peak Performance and a Sustained performance of ~20TFlops.

ECMWF’s forecast products are disseminated over Regional Meteorological Data Communications Network (RMDCN). The main aim is to provide a network infrastructure for both the connections between ECMWF and its Member and Co-Operating States. The Supercomputers have a 50% resource allocation to Research, 25% for Operational forecasts and another 25% allocated to Member States for any activities they wish to perform.

We had a very successful visit to the Museum of Computing in Swindon, with 24 attendees, and everyone had a very enjoyable time.

Jeremy Holt, the chairman, gave us some history of the Museum: t was the first physical Museum of its kind in the UK dedicated to the history of computing. This was followed by Simon Webb (the curator) giving us a tour of the current exhibits. The exhibits are changed regularly either using items from its vast store room, or provided by individual collectors.

The exhibits we saw included:

• The evolution of calculators from log tables to electronic calculators, through mechanical devices and slide rules,
• the development of the "home" computer from 1970 onwards,
• the development of the PC, and Apple Mac systems

Many of these were accessible to "hands on" usage. Do you remember typing Basic programs into a BBC Micro Model B machine?

Their most recent specialist exhibition related to gaming, and showed the evolution of "games machines" over the last 35 years, and again there was the opportunity to play many of these.

The Museum also runs a Saturday Club for children, which is actively supported, and they have a significant waiting list.

I would encourage everyone who could not make it with us to visit on their own. The Museum is open Fridays and Saturdays. Further information can be found at their web site: http://www.museum-of-computing.org.uk/

13th October 2011: Ian Hughes, Director, Feeding Edge Limited

Following our short Annual General Meeting, Ian Hughes (known as ePredator online), Metaverse Evangelist, talked about how computer games and virtual worlds are changing the way that we look at technology and the way that we communicate in business. Ian writes an entertaining blog at www.feedingedge.co.uk/blog and is Chair of the BCS Animation and Games Development Specialist Group.

Ian explained that for the last few years, he has mostly worked as consultant online in a virtual workplace. Anything else now seems strange to him. He is also the resident ‘Super Geek’ on the TV programme Cool Stuff Collective currently showing on ITV1 on Saturday mornings.

Ian pointed out that most people now play games of all sorts and Gamification is a recognised way to make technology more engaging. Gaming and virtual worlds are also big business. The server side of WoW consists of 20,000 computers, 1.3 petabytes of storage, 75,000 CPU cores, 5.5 million lines of code and 2 million words of text. Second Life’s in-game user-to-user economic activity totalled $567 million in 2009.

We can use this type of technology to improve the effectiveness of what we do and to make it a richer and more memorable experience. For example, the user experience of Second Life can be far superior to that of telephone and video conferencing. We should not regard these technologies as just for amusement; they can help people learn, they can be used to effectively get across messages and can greatly assist the creative process. Ian encouraged us all to embrace these technologies, as otherwise we will be left behind by young people who understand what is possible now and in the future.

17^th February 2011 – Testing Agile Projects – Dr Stuart Reid, CTO, Testing Solutions Group

Our February talk was held in the impressive setting of Sophos’s UK Headquarters based in Abingdon. Sophos laid on a superb spread of sandwiches, delicious cakes and biscuits, tea and coffee to begin the evening in the Atrium of their main building.

For this talk, we had one of our largest audiences for the year with 93 people turning up to hear Dr Stuart Reid present on the advantages and disadvantages of Agile methods and particular techniques that he had used in testing Agile projects.

He introduced the Agile manifesto and principles and focused particularly on how you integrate test engineers into Agile development teams for a successful outcome. He highlighted a number of independent resources which had researched the statistical success of Agile projects, reasons why these projects fail or succeed and, in particular, how much more popular Agile now is as a methodology.

As Stuart’s talk gained momentum, he went on to look at the different process options that could be used to make Agile scalable in a real world context such that very large projects could be addressed.

Following the talk, enthusiastic debate on the subject continued late into the evening in the Spam and Lettuce bar.

The slides from Stuart’s talk are available from the downloads area of our Web Site.

Tim Lambertstock, Payments Consultant, was the speaker at our well-attended January meeting. Tim gave an introduction to payments and payment systems, covering both the UK and international schemes. He went on to describe how this is changing, particularly with initiatives such as the UK Faster Payments scheme and how new entrants – both new banks and alternative payment providers – were likely to impact the market.   This led to a lively and very interactive discussion on future payment systems, how the use of cash could change and what would emerge to address the planned ending of cheque clearing in the UK in 2018.

Tim talked about how mobile and online payments are the key to the future and where most development is currently taking place, not just by the banks as traditional payment providers but by mobile operators and third parties.

The slides from Simon’s talk are available from our download section.

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