Engagement with Business Development Managers / Industry

N8 HPC Site Updates July 2015

Durham Nothing to report.

Lancaster Met with Colin McLaughlin, Technology Transfer Manager from School of Computing and Comms – he’s been assigned as our N8 HPC BDM. Shows a good grasp of the area, and has attended some recent N8 business/industry meetings.

Leeds Nothing to report.

Liverpool Nothing to report.

Manchester  Exploring connections with several industry partners.

 Also considering Industry 4.0 review.

Newcastle

Sheffield Awaiting response from business engagement manager at Sheffield.

York Nothing to report Training

Durham Nothing to report

Lancaster Nothing to report

Liverpool Nothing to report.

Manchester Training review in Research IT. CDT, community training, external training all being considered.

Newcastle

Sheffield Previous training

 Software Carpentry Instructor training

 GPU CUDA Programming by NVIDIA/Plymouth

 Introduction to UNIX

 Introduction to HPC

 Introduction to Matlab

Forthcoming:

 GPU Computing Seminar 22nd July - Performance Portability by Dr Alan Gray (EPCC) http://hpchub.sites.sheffield.ac.uk/news-event/gpucomputingseminar22ndjuly- performanceportabilitybydralangrayepcc

 N8 HPC Network Event MULTISCALE COMPUTATIONAL MECHANICS: Friday 30th October 2015 http://hpchub.sites.sheffield.ac.uk/news- event/n8hpcnetworkeventmultiscalecomputationalmechanicsfriday30thoctober2015 York In the process for preparing our training program for the autumn term. Planning an "Introduction to Parallel Programming/Computation course" Working with Archer on providing on-line training for Linux/Bash and possible High Performance R.

Services / Projects

Durham Two new projects. There were some issues with the initial passwords. Solved by users phoning the appropriate Leeds contacts.

Lancaster Implementing new filestore to replace our aging Tier 3’s current product.

Liverpool George Barakos and his team are leaving Liverpool. This will make a dent in Liverpool utilisation.

One new project, with some external support, was started.

Manchester  Currently Research IT is expanding our local platforms to provide support for data analysis in support of new clinical proteomics centre.

 Projects coming forward for the Farr facility. Still in pilot however.

Newcastle Institutional HPC at Newcastle: Co-wrote proposal document for an HPC service, comprising hard/software, Sysadmin, and RSE-type role (Research software technologist). This has gone before the university research committee, and will be discussed at next week’s HPC steering group meeting. Currently working on RSE job description, and a positional statement for the IT department. Data Visualisation Service and Community of Practice: This is an effort to pull together some development capability within our IT department, and a handful of interested researchers of various levels of ability and curiosity, and is more about traditional static and dynamic plots, infographics, and data-driven storytelling, than computational visualisation. However, I expect that it will demonstrate demand for the latter.

Sheffield Two new projects including - Jeremy Oakley Calibration and analysis of complex individual based stochastic models. The project has partners from other institutions can we have clarification that the registration procedure will work for these users?

York We have expanded the UV 200 system with more cores and memory. A 0.5 FTE has been appointed for research computing support.

Issues Identified by Users

Durham Fair share and throughput of big jobs ~> 1024 cores are becoming a contentious issue here. This is compounded by the dismal latest usage figures. The monthly average for Durham is still < 80% of share.

Lancaster Nothing to report from users. Still puzzled as to how Lancaster’s usage is proportionately so high, given other institutions are having difficulties.

Manchester One user has seen issues around fairshare. We have investigated and it appears to behaving as we expect and Mark has updated the website.

Newcastle EU-Brazil group (EUBCC on N8) external collaborators have finally got Newcastle user I.D.s which allow them to work on the N8. Newcastle’s ‘process’ for getting user I.D.s with a life longer than four weeks for external collaborators needs reform.