As part of the Excalibur Project (Exascale Computing: ALgorithms and Infrastructures Benefiting UK Research), the Materials Modelling community held their mini kick-off meeting on Monday May 11th. The working group is to help develop and provide a roadmap for software for use on next generation exascale computing architectures. This was recently funded by an EPSRC High Priority Use Case call  as part of the overall Excalibur project. Matt Watkins and Sergey Chulkov are working on code development for this group, along with York, UCL, STFC and EPCC and others.

The ExCALIBUR programme is led by the Met Office and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) along with the Public Sector Research Establishment, the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) research councils, including the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), the Medical Research Council (MRC) and the Science and Technologies Facilities Council (STFC).

The virtual meeting went well with over 60 participants and 7 invited speakers, many international – they are cheaper virtually!