ARCHER News
Tuesday 27th March 2018
- Reminder : Exascale Applications and Software Conference (EASC 2018) - Early bird deadline approaching and schedule available
- ARCHER Champions, Manchester 25th April 2018
- Webinar : Meltdown for Dummies: The road to hell is paved with good intentions
- Training : Upcoming ARCHER Training Opportunities
Exascale Applications and Software Conference (EASC 2018) - Early bird deadline approaching and schedule available
The deadline for early bird registration is this Wednesday, 28th of March, so register ASAP to get the best deal. Registration is simple via the website at www.easc2018.ed.ac.uk/registration/, and feel free to email us if you have any non standard requests.
With 37 accepted talks, 5 keynotes, 15 posters and a panel, EASC will be a busy few days! We have published the schedule online at www.easc2018.ed.ac.uk/conference-programme/ and as you can see there is a wide variety of topics, tackling the Exascale challenge, from novel techniques at the low level runtimes to the higher level parallelisation and performance of applications - and every thing in between!
Selected papers from the conference will be published in a special issue of the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing. We will release a CfP for this separately and submissions will close on the 31st July 2018.
EASC attendees are invited to register for a free Exascale Applications Workshop, to be held at Pollock Halls immediately after EASC (Thursday 19 April p.m. / Friday 20 April a.m.). This workshop, organised by the INTERTWinE project, will focus on communication models and their use in applications, with a view to increasing the scalability of scientific and industrial codes to exascale. See www.intertwine-project.eu/european-exascale-applications-workshop.
ARCHER Champions: Manchester, MoSI Wednesday 25th April 2018
The next ARCHER Champions will be held in Manchester at the Museum of Science and Industry on Wednesday 25th April 2018. It will be a full day meeting which will follow the UK/US SSI Impact Event taking place on Tuesday 24th April. There will be an evening meal on the Tuesday evening in Manchester.
Topics will include the eCSE programme, training and MOOCs, Tier 2 and a discussion session on the future of Champions. We will also have sessions with lightning talks from Champions so please let us know if you would like to contribute.
Registration for the workshop is now open.
Bursaries will be available to cover reasonable travel and accommodation costs. If you would like to apply for a bursary,please contact the ARCHER helpdesk.
Webinar : Meltdown for Dummies: The road to hell is paved with good intentions
Wednesday 28 March 2018 15:00
David Henty, EPCC
The history of IT security seems littered with tales of apocalyptic vulnerabilities that would end the world - does your Heart Bleed at the mention of the Y2K bug? However, the recent scares over Meltdown were based on a really big problem:
ANY user could read ANY memory on almost ANY system, bypassing ALL security measures.
In this webinar I will try and explain the origin of Meltdown from a dummy's point of view (i.e. my own). I will use an everyday analogy of accessing documents from a lawyer's office to illustrate the origins of the vulnerability and how it can be exploited. I will also present results of recent tests exploring how much the anti-Meltdown patches affect HPC system performance.
Meltdown is an extremely interesting example as, to understand it, you need to understand a wide range of issues covering both CPU hardware and system software design. Even if you're not that concerned with IT security, I hope that this presentation will help explain how modern multi-user computers actually work.
Most importantly, I hope to show that the design decisions that led to Meltdown all seem perfectly sensible in themselves. However, as Saint Bernard of Clairvaux wrote in the early 12th century, "the road to hell is paved with good intentions".
Upcoming Training Opportunities
Registration open now
- Message-Passing programming with MPI Southampton 11 - 13 April 2018
- Advanced MPI Exeter 26 - 27 April 2018
- Advanced OpenMP Cambridge 17 - 19 July 2018
Full details and registration at http://www.archer.ac.uk/training/index.php
