<p>N8 HPC Site Updates April 2016</p><p>Engagement with Business Development Managers / Industry</p><p>Durham Nothing to report</p><p>Lancaster Nothing to report</p><p>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.</p><p>Liverpool Nothing to report</p><p>Manchester Series of events planned to introduce Research IT to Research Support Services including Business Engagement.</p><p>Industry attendees at the forthcoming N8 HPC Network event on Tuesday in Manchester.</p><p>Newcastle Nothing to report</p><p>Sheffield Nothing to report</p><p>York Our business manager is organising a talk with suitable local businesses.</p><p>Training</p><p>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).</p><p>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</p><p>Liverpool Scientific Python course from ARCHER / EPCC being run at end of May; Joint with NOC</p><p>NIVIDIA afternoon workshop – Introducing computation on GPUs with an emphasis on Deep Learning; Thursday 28th April</p><p>Manchester Two members of Research IT attended the ARCHER Champions workshop</p><p>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)</p><p> 31/3 – Programming with MatLab</p><p> 4/4 – Introduction to Visualization</p><p>Upcoming:  20/4 – Introduction to Python</p><p>Newcastle Attended Archer Champions workshop</p><p>Sheffield  Code Cafe: Taking First Steps in R</p><p> First Open Astronomy: Software Carpentry Workshop</p><p> 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</p><p> Local courses - Introduction to Linux and HPC (2 x0.5 day sessions)</p><p>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.</p><p>Promotion / publicity of N8 HPC</p><p>Durham Nothing to report</p><p>Lancaster Nothing to report</p><p>Leeds Embedded into activities</p><p>Liverpool Advanced Research Computing Day, tentatively 4th July at Liverpool, will include at least one talk that mentions N8 HPC (my overview talk)</p><p>Manchester Promotion of N8 HPC through Research IT newsletter and Twitter feed.</p><p>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.</p><p>Sheffield Research Computing Advisory Group Meeting and consultations, group updated on activities of N8 HPC.</p><p>York Nothing to report.</p><p>Services / Projects</p><p>Durham Nothing to report</p><p>Lancaster 1,200 core refresh of local T3 coming on line soon</p><p>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.</p><p>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).</p><p>Manchester Several new N8 HPC Manchester projects over the last month or two.</p><p>DPSF soon in production --- see http://ri.itservices.manchester.ac.uk/~simonh/_hydra/slide-deck.slideshow.html for details</p><p>Newcastle Institutional HPC service business case approved, at last. Requirements gathering and recruitment of posts to begin during coming months.</p><p>Sheffield Expecting delivery and installation of Sheffield Advanced Research Computer,  Revised framework 2+2 years under NSSA</p><p> 49xDell C6320 Servers each dual 8 core E5-2630v3 (Haswell-EP) 4GB/core and 16GB/core (784cores)</p><p> 2xC4130 with 8xNVIDIA Tesla K80 (GPU compute with GPU direct)</p><p> 600TB lustre filestore</p><p> Pulmonary Lung and Respiratory Imaging Sheffield (MRC funded POLARIS project)– 59xC6320s, Dell 7910 with NVIDIA Quadro K4200 for visualisation </p><p> Omnipath interconnect</p><p>York We have had a few new projects this year and this has caused our usage to increase.</p><p>Issues Identified by Users</p><p>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.</p><p>Liverpool None apart from the slow turnaround – Liverpool usage has dropped to around 12% of used cycles.</p><p>Manchester None reported</p><p>Newcastle A few queuing grumbles</p><p>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.</p><p>York Nothing to report.</p>