ARCHER News
Tuesday 20th February 2018
- Modules to be removed during Maintenance Session on 28th February 2018
- Fully funded places for HPC placements around Europe: Closing 25 Feb
- PRACE Preparatory Access Call
- Exascale Applications and Software Conference (EASC 2018) - Reminder
- HPC Europa
- Hands-on Porting and Optimisation Workshop: Making the most of ARCHER - 8th March, Oxford
- State of the ART I/O Tools - Virtual Tutorial
- ARCHER Annual User Survey 2018
- Training : Upcoming ARCHER Training Opportunities
Modules to be removed during Maintenance Session on 28th February 2018
We are planning to remove old modules on ARCHER to allow for the installation of newer modules. The modules which will be deleted have not been part of a default set previously. We are keeping the two previous default sets and will not be changing the default set at this time.
A full list of modules to be deleted as part of this maintenance is available at www.archer.ac.uk/about-archer/news-events/news/2018-02-14-module_removal.php.
If you have any questions or concerns about these planned removals please contact the ARCHER Helpdesk.
Summer of HPC
Are you or is someone you know an early-stage postgraduate or late-stage undergraduate student? If so, you are invited to apply for the PRACE Summer of HPC 2018 programme, which will be held in July & August 2018.
The programme consists of a training week and two months of placement at top HPC centres around Europe. The programme affords participants the opportunity to learn and share information about PRACE and HPC, and includes accommodation, a stipend, and travel to their HPC centre placement. Please visit https://summerofhpc.prace-ri.eu for more info.
Closing date: 25th February.
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.
Exascale Applications and Software Conference (EASC 2018) - Edinburgh, UK. 17-19 April 2018 - Call for posters
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.
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.
Hands-on Porting and Optimisation Workshop: Making the most of ARCHER
Thursday March 8th, 2018, Oxford e-Research Centre, University of Oxford
This is an excellent opportunity to receive one-on-one guidance and individually tailored advice from high-performance computing specialists about how best to make use of ARCHER. Attendees will be given accounts on ARCHER for the workshop, with dedicated access on the day to significant portions of the machine.
You will be assigned an ARCHER technical advisor in advance, who will work with you directly during and in some cases before the workshop to help you in any way you need.
The workshop is aimed at:
- Current users of the ARCHER service (including developers) looking to improve the performance of their code, e.g. parallel scaling and/or IO, in order to make more efficient use of the machine.
- New users of the ARCHER service looking to port existing software - be it their own code or a third-party application - to run on the machine for the first time or to explore its performance prior to an application for time on ARCHER.
- Potential future users of the service looking to understand whether ARCHER is suitable for their computing needs and could potentially accelerate their research.
- Users who want to learn more about data management or using the RDF (Research Data Facility) and how this can help their work on ARCHER.
The workshop is open to anyone interested in using ARCHER; it is not restricted to current users. We encourage applications from small teams of collaborators. The workshop is tailored to individual participants and we can cater to the needs of attendees with a wide range of previous experience.
This workshop is free to all. For more information and to register please visit http://archer.ac.uk/training/.
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.
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.
Upcoming Training Opportunities
Registration open now
- 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
- Advanced OpenMP Cambridge 17 - 19 July 2018
Full details and registration at http://www.archer.ac.uk/training/index.php
