The HPC Edition

Welcome to the April 2016 edition of benchmark, which as you can tell from the front cover, is a special edition focussed on High Performance Computing. HPC is an area which has been given more and more attention by NAFEMS over recent years, featuring heavily in our events programme, and leading to a specific working group being set-up in 2011. The issue of limited compute power is one which is common throughout the analysis community, and ways of addressing this will always be of keen interest to everyone involved. In this issue, a number of articles discussing how HPC can be benchmarked, utilized efficiently, and accessed ‘in the cloud’ are included, as well as an interesting piece on how HPC was one of the main drivers for SDM. Our aim has been to find many perspectives on the area, and we hope that you find the articles included both useful and stimulating.

2016 sees the return of our successful regional conference series, with events taking place around the globe. As I write, the agendas for these conferences are just taking shape, and they promise to give all those who attend a unique viewpoint on simulation and analysis in their region, with presentations coming from across industry and academia. These conferences have steadily grown in stature over recent years, and we now firmly believe that they represent an excellent opportunity for everyone within the community to gain knowledge, get a view of what’s going on outside their own organisation, and improve their own efficiency. We hope that you will be able to attend one of these events, and encourage you to view the agendas at nafems.org/2016 if you have not done so already.

This issue also sees a ‘new recruit’ to the editorial team. Althea de Souza, chair of the NAFEMS CFD Working group and a name known to many within NAFEMS, has come on board in the role of Commissioning Editor. Althea comes with a wealth of experience, and will help to bring a fresh perspective to the magazines content.

We hope you enjoy this issue. As ever, if you have any comments or ideas for future articles, please do get in touch!