Author: Tom Keal
Affiliation: STFC/UKRI
Email: thomas.keal@stfc.ac.uk
The Materials Chemistry Consortium, the UK’s High End Computing consortium for Materials Chemistry, held its 8th conference at STFC Daresbury Laboratory on 1st to 3rd July, with over 120 community members attending.
Invited speaker Silvia Maria Casassa
The conference is now held annually at Daresbury and follows a three day format with speakers and posters from the community and invited talks from academic and industrial groups from the UK and overseas, together with the traditional conference barbecue by the canal.
This year, the MCC welcomed David Munoz Ramo from Quantinuum who talked about molecular and materials simulation on ion trap quantum computers, and David Gao from Nanolayers who presented on turning computational materials research into industrial impact.
International speakers included Silvia Maria Casassa (University of Torino) talking about the materials modelling package CRYSTAL, Guillaume Martin (University of Montpellier) who spoke about MOF simulations with machine learned potentials., and Karsten Albe (TU Darmstadt) on layered transition metal oxides for battery applications. Saiful Islam (Oxford) presented on modelling of energy materials including lithium batteries and perovskite solar cells.
At the end of the meeting a special hybrid discussion session was held on the future of MCC and how the community can engage with developments around the National Compute Resources and Next National Supercomputing Service, including the planned Community Centres of Excellence.
As we reach the final year of the current MCC grant, it was fantastic to see the high turnout from the community and the rapid transformation of the materials modelling landscape through the excellent range of talks and poster presentations. The organising committee (Scott Woodley, Alexey Sokol, Tom Durrant, Alin Elena, Tom Keal) would like to give special thanks to Georgia Lomas and the admin team for event support at Daresbury.
