N8 HPC Site Updates April 2016
Engagement with Business Development Managers / Industry
Durham Nothing to report
Lancaster Nothing to report
Leeds * Working with new academic & business consortium at Leeds on Virtual city modelling bid * Working with new ‘omics consortium at Leeds to develop computational training and HPC support * MTC and ANR attended ‘Archer Champions’ meeting in Edinburgh (along with other N8 colleagues). * MTC and ANR attended the Software Sustainability Institute Collaborations Workshop in Edinburgh recently (along with other N8 colleagues). The next workshop will take place in Leeds 27-29 March 2017. * A new visualisation network is being established at Leeds. We are taking an active interest in how ARC and HPC can support this.
Liverpool Nothing to report
Manchester Series of events planned to introduce Research IT to Research Support Services including Business Engagement.
Industry attendees at the forthcoming N8 HPC Network event on Tuesday in Manchester.
Newcastle Nothing to report
Sheffield Nothing to report
York Our business manager is organising a talk with suitable local businesses.
Training
Durham Nothing to report Lancaster Sheffield’s Mike Croucher will be visiting Lancaster next month to give a seminar on research software. I’m due to meet him to discuss resource/knowledge sharing (e.g. training materials).
Leeds * Continuing to develop training courses * Latest workshops include ‘Version control with Git and Github’, ‘Cloud Computing for Research’ and ‘High Performance Python’ * Additional successful funding from NERC (£50k joint bid with School of Earth and Environment) to deliver SC workshops to 120 NERC funded PhD students and ECRs in the 2016-17 academic year. * ARCHER/EPCC 'Introduction to Modern Fortran' at Leeds on 12 & 13 May (Open to all) * Local SC workshops with Language@Leeds, Medical Engineering and Biological Sciences- all with a HPC element
Liverpool Scientific Python course from ARCHER / EPCC being run at end of May; Joint with NOC
NIVIDIA afternoon workshop – Introducing computation on GPUs with an emphasis on Deep Learning; Thursday 28th April
Manchester Two members of Research IT attended the ARCHER Champions workshop
Past courses: 15/2 – Introduction to MatLab (Software Carpentry) 14/3 – Introduction to Visualization for Finite Element Modelling with ParaView (2.5 hours for Fusion DTC)
31/3 – Programming with MatLab
4/4 – Introduction to Visualization
Upcoming: 20/4 – Introduction to Python
Newcastle Attended Archer Champions workshop
Sheffield Code Cafe: Taking First Steps in R
First Open Astronomy: Software Carpentry Workshop
Matlab Workshops : o Best practices with parallel matlab o Best Practice for Data Analysis with Matlab Forthcoming training courses OpenMP with Archer 11-12th may - info at https://goo.gl/ORRl8Y
Local courses - Introduction to Linux and HPC (2 x0.5 day sessions)
York Usual round of courses for spring term. Matlab have given some on-site training on using the parallel toolkit. Was well received by attendees.
Promotion / publicity of N8 HPC
Durham Nothing to report
Lancaster Nothing to report
Leeds Embedded into activities
Liverpool Advanced Research Computing Day, tentatively 4th July at Liverpool, will include at least one talk that mentions N8 HPC (my overview talk)
Manchester Promotion of N8 HPC through Research IT newsletter and Twitter feed.
Newcastle - Met with a group of Newcastle PhD students from our Singapore campus. Some myth- dispelling to do (separate ‘no-priority’ queue for students, only business collaboration projects allowed on the machine). Thankfully some potential new users as well.
Sheffield Research Computing Advisory Group Meeting and consultations, group updated on activities of N8 HPC.
York Nothing to report.
Services / Projects
Durham Nothing to report
Lancaster 1,200 core refresh of local T3 coming on line soon
Several new N8 HPC projects this quarter from Lancaster, including two from already-registered PIs Leeds * Further work on planning for additional local HPC cluster * New Leeds ARC Web site and documentation in development * Centre of Excellence for Modelling of Atmosphere and Climate (CEMAC) and Petabyte Environmental Tape Archive and Library (PETAL) have recently been launched. * Leeds ARC will have two summer undergraduate placement students working on projects over the Summer period.
Liverpool Professor Andy Cooper is interested in buying circa 1000 cores to support computation in the Materials Innovation Factory and a remote collocation is a possibility (likely depends mostly on timing where the hardware will be sited).
Manchester Several new N8 HPC Manchester projects over the last month or two.
DPSF soon in production --- see http://ri.itservices.manchester.ac.uk/~simonh/_hydra/slide-deck.slideshow.html for details
Newcastle Institutional HPC service business case approved, at last. Requirements gathering and recruitment of posts to begin during coming months.
Sheffield Expecting delivery and installation of Sheffield Advanced Research Computer, Revised framework 2+2 years under NSSA
49xDell C6320 Servers each dual 8 core E5-2630v3 (Haswell-EP) 4GB/core and 16GB/core (784cores)
2xC4130 with 8xNVIDIA Tesla K80 (GPU compute with GPU direct)
600TB lustre filestore
Pulmonary Lung and Respiratory Imaging Sheffield (MRC funded POLARIS project)– 59xC6320s, Dell 7910 with NVIDIA Quadro K4200 for visualisation
Omnipath interconnect
York We have had a few new projects this year and this has caused our usage to increase.
Issues Identified by Users
Lancaster One from me: I’m still puzzling through the poor MPI performance for cp2k v3; Mark, Cliff and Dave L are offering advice Leeds * Some users struggling to meet deadlines due to reduced throughput. This was managed with a change to project priorities.
Liverpool None apart from the slow turnaround – Liverpool usage has dropped to around 12% of used cycles.
Manchester None reported
Newcastle A few queuing grumbles
Sheffield Professor He's Turbulence studies group have expressed concern over change in resourcing levels resulting from recent events. I will be meeting his group next week.
York Nothing to report.