ARCHER News

Tuesday 13th February 2018

• Object-Oriented programming with Fortran - Training course, STFC Daresbury, 27-28 February 2018
• PRACE Preparatory Access Call
• State of the ART I/O Tools - Virtual Tutorial
• Exascale Applications and Software Conference (EASC 2018) - Edinburgh, UK. 17-19 April 2018 - Call for posters
• HPC Europa
• ARCHER Annual User Survey 2018
• Providing Feedback on ARCHER
• Training : Upcoming ARCHER Training Opportunities

Object-Oriented programming with Fortran - Training course

STFC Daresbury, 27-28 February 2018

Fortran is often used for scientific applications, but applications are mainly developed using the standard procedural programming techniques that Fortran was initially designed for.

OOP is a programming methodology designed to enable safe and reusable programming, coupling procedures with the data they operate on in classes and using them as objects. More commonly associated with large programs, and programs written in industry/companies, there are many scientific applications that become very large and long-lived and therefore could benefit from such programming techniques to make development, maintenance, and extension of the code simpler and safer.

Whilst Fortran is generally viewed as a procedural programming language there are features in the most recent versions of the Fortran standards (90, 95, and 2003) that enable development in OOP or OOP-like ways. We will introduce these language features and discuss/explore how they can be used in scientific applications.

This course is free to attend and registration is open now: events.prace-ri.eu/event/714/.

PRACE Preparatory Access Call

Preparatory access is intended for testing and developing codes in order to prepare applications for PRACE Tier-0 project access. In particular, we would like to draw your attention to the Preparatory Access Type C and Type D which includes code development with support from PRACE experts. Type C provides direct access to a Tier-0 system. Type D offers users to start the optimisation work on a PRACE Tier-1 national system to finally reach PRACE Tier-0 system scalability.

Further information is given on the PRACE web page: prace-ri.eu/PRACE-Preparatory-Access. The Preparatory Access Call is a rolling call, researchers can apply for access all year. There are no closing dates, proposals for Type C and Type D will be reviewed every third month. The next cut-off date is March 1st, 2018. We invite all interested scientists, whose projects fit the criteria of the PRACE call to submit their projects. The criteria for the PRACE Calls as well as complete information on the PRACE machines, how to apply and on the PRACE peer review process can be found on the website mentioned above.

State of the ART I/O Tools - Virtual Tutorial

Wednesday 28th February 2018 15:00 Online

Elsa Gonsiorowski, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

I/O has historically been an afterthought in application development and performance analysis. As processing power increases and accelerators increase performance, Amdahl's law increasingly points to I/O as an opportunity for performance optimization. Unfortunately, the tool framework for analysis of I/O performance is not as robust as that for computational performance. Tools that exist, such as IOR and Darshan, target a very small slice of I/O performance. Additionally complicating this space is the introduction of hierarchical storage into the I/O space. With the increased prevalence of burst buffers and other forms of hierarchical storage, we can expect to find new answers to historically well-studied problems such as optimal checkpointing frequency.

This talk will cover basic I/O strategies and cover state-of-the-art I/O tools that can be used to prepare for burst buffer architectures. It will include MACSio (an I/O benchmark emulating physics-simulations) and the Scalable / Checkpoint Restart (SCR) library.

Exascale Applications and Software Conference (EASC 2018) - Edinburgh, UK. 17-19 April 2018 - Call for posters

Conference Update: Our keynote speakers are: Jeffrey Vetter (group leader, future technologies group at Oak Ridge National Lab), Dominic Harlow (consultant at the FIA), Andreas Olofsson, (program Manager in the Microsystems Technology Office at DARPA) and Satoshi Matsuoka (Professor of Global Scientific Information Center at Tokyo Institute of Technology.) More details about our keynote speakers, as well as their topics, can be found on the EASC website.

It's not too late to showcase your work at EASC!

Hot Topic Posters: Poster submissions on recent or on-going research in the topics of interest listed at www.easc2018.ed.ac.uk/call-for-participation are warmly welcomed. Poster presenters will have the opportunity to present a lightning talk (1-2 minutes) introducing the topic of their poster. Please send a brief abstract (max. 100 words, plus one image) to info@easc2018.ed.ac.uk by 1st of March 2018.

Early bird registration now open

Registration is now open and you will be able to enjoy our early bird discount until the 28th of March 2018. Please visit www.easc2018.ed.ac.uk/registration to register and for more details.

More information

For full information please see the EASC2018 homepage: www.easc2018.ed.ac.uk.

HPC Europa

HPC-Europa is an interdisciplinary EC-funded programme which allows researchers to carry out short "transnational access" visits to collaborate with a research department working in a similar field while at the same time gaining access to High Performance Computing facilities.

Researchers in the UK can benefit from this programme in two ways: by hosting researchers from Europe within their own group, or by making a research visit to a department in Finland, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain or Sweden.

We would like to inform people that the third call for HPC-Europa applicants closes on Wednesday 28th February 2018 (23:59 CET).

Future closing dates will be held approximately every 3 months, and the HPC-Europa3 programme continues until April 2021.

If you have not heard of HPC-Europa before, further information and the on-line application form can be found at www.hpc-europa.org and any questions not answered by the information on the webpage can be emailed to staff@hpc-europa.org.

ARCHER Annual User Survey 2017

We are committed to continually improving the ARCHER Service and would like to request your input to help us understand what is important to you, where the Service is working well and where there is scope for improvement. The ARCHER Annual User Survey consists of just 9 questions and should take only a few minutes of your time to complete. There are opportunities to add more detailed comments if you wish.

For each survey response received, we will donate £1 to Save The Children.

We are also offering 5 prizes of 3000 kAU on ARCHER for users who complete the survey. Winners can choose to forgo the kAU prize and for each winner that does this we will donate a further £20 to Save The Children. Winners will be drawn at random from all respondents who have left contact details after the closing date of Wednesday 21 February 2018 and the winners notified by e-mail. The prizes are only available to people with existing ARCHER user accounts.

You can find the survey on the ARCHER Website at: www.archer.ac.uk/community/surveys/annual2017.php.

Thank you in advance for taking the time to complete this survey. The responses will be used to try and improve the service for you and to help identify key areas for service development.

Providing Feedback on ARCHER

Feedback from users on the ARCHER service is a key to helping us provide the best service possible to researchers. We are currently gathering feedback from ARCHER users via the ARCHER Annual Survey but there are a couple of other important mechanisms you can use to provide feedback at any time:

• Quality Tokens: all ARCHER users can feedback on the current performance of the ARCHER service through the SAFE using Quality Tokens. This mechanism allows you to rate the performance of ARCHER and leave a comment as to why you chose the rating you did. See: www.archer.ac.uk/documentation/safe-guide/safe-guide-users.php#token.
• Query Feedback: all In Depth queries that are handled by the ARCHER computational science and engineering (CSE) support team provide a direct link for users to use to feedback on how their issue has been handled by the team.

In addition to the valuable feedback we gain from these mechanisms, which helps us to improve the ARCHER service, we donate £1 to Save the Children for each response that we receive.

Upcoming Training Opportunities

Registration open now

Registration open
• Message-Passing programming with MPI Online over four Wednesday afternoons Starting Wednesday 31st January 2018
• Object-Oriented programming with Fortran STFC Daresbury 27-28 February 2018
• Porting and Optimisation Workshop Oxford 8 March 2018
• Efficient Parallel IO on ARCHER Cambridge 20 - 21 March 2018
• Threaded Programming Southampton 20 - 22 March 2018
• Message-Passing programming with MPI Southampton 11 - 13 April 2018

Full details and registration at http://www.archer.ac.uk/training/index.php