High-Performance Computing
Accelerating crop genetics research to secure sustainable global food production
The James Hutton Institute hosts the UK’s Crop Diversity High-Performance Computing (HPC) resource, supporting collaborative crop genetics research across leading UK institutions. This powerful platform enables the development of advanced analytical tools essential for breeding resilient, high-performing crop varieties.
HPC powering sustainable agriculture
Much of the computational resource is provided by Graphic Processing Units (GPUs), which are designed with a highly parallel architecture, containing thousands of cores that can handle multiple threads simultaneously. This enables them to process large amounts of data at once, significantly increasing throughput compared to traditional CPUs that typically have fewer cores optimized for sequential processing. They also contain additional specialized hardware for specific workloads, like Tensor Cores for deep learning or machine learning calculations and are particularly suited for training neural networks required by modern AI techniques.
We are deploying these technologies to aid in computer vision tasks like image processing, segmentation, and feature extraction from our high-throughput plant phenotyping platform. This enables researchers and growers to assess large populations of plants efficiently, identify plants that exhibit stress or suboptimal growth conditions earlier in their development, allowing for timely interventions, to help farmers make more informed decisions regarding crop management, or contribute to more sustainable agricultural practices, reducing inputs like water and fertilizer.
Our HPC – which is one of the largest in Scotland – provides researchers with access to incredible compute power, vast amounts of memory, and petabytes of storage capacity, all running on an ultra-fast 100-gigabit network.
Iain Milne, Bioinformatics and Web Svcs ICS
High performance computing uses powerful computer systems to process extremely large or complex datasets at high speed. Collaborations involving James Hutton Institute Scientific Services use HPC to support advanced scientific modelling, data analysis and simulation.
Many modern scientific studies generate large volumes of data that require substantial computing power to analyse. High performance computing allows researchers to run complex models and analyse large datasets efficiently.
HPC is used in areas such as climate modelling, genomics, environmental research and agricultural science. These technologies allow researchers to explore complex systems and predict future scenarios.
