All the typical equestrian paraphernalia was on offer this week at the Dublin Horse Show at the RDS, with stalls flogging bridles and bits, silk top hats and velvet riding helmets, Wellington boots, horse vitamins and high-performance computing.
"We don't really have a product on the shelf we're trying to sell," said Ms Audrie Crosbie, manager at Trinity College's Irish Centre for the Transfer of Advanced Computing Technology (ICeTACT). Instead, the group has set up a stand to make agribusiness aware of the potential commercial applications of supercomputers.
Supercomputers are extremely expensive, sophisticated machines capable of doing complex calculations at very high speed. In the past, they have been used to map and model massive, dynamic systems, like global weather patterns or national economies. But as computer power has multiplied and costs have come down and as it has become feasible to duplicate supercomputing power by networking together a number of desktop personal computers high-performance computing (HPC) has become an accessible industrial tool.
The aerospace and automotive industries were quick on the pickup for HPC, but ICeTACT, along with sponsors the EU ESPRIT program, thought Ireland would be a good place to preach HPC to the food, agriculture and fisheries businesses as well. ICeTACT makes use of the massive supercomputer jointly purchased by TCD and Queen's University Belfast a little over a year ago, the largest in Ireland and 16th largest in Europe. Their IBM SP-2 is capable of 30 billion calculations per second.
That kind of power makes HPC useful in commercial cattle breeding, where a breeder might be plotting 50 different traits since each trait requires 10 million equations in breeding calculations. Finland is already using HPC to create a breeding database for its national herd of 10,000 cows and ICeTACT hopes the Irish Cattle Breeders Association might follow suit.
HPC has also been used in places to model effluent flowing from fish farms, and in the food manufacturing industries, it has proved useful in modelling the mixing process of foods and in designing machinery.
Trinity and Queen's have pledged 20 per cent of the SP-2's computing time to industry at no cost and are eager to involve companies in their programme.
"This is something that can help Ireland as an industrial base," said Dr James Sexton, director of HPC at Trinity, and an astrophysicist by trade. "Our biggest barrier is awareness creation, getting people to understand the potential that's there."
Ms Crosbie noted that HPC still has very little penetration in agriculture: "We thought the way to reach the widest audience was by coming to something like this."
Most Horse Show patrons seemed bemused, and Dr Sexton says he is hoping for a handful of contacts rather than mass interest. Nonetheless, general visitors would no doubt appreciate one of the group's programs, which uses the SP-2's computing muscle to measure the fairness of the odds offered by a bookie a practical application indeed.
