ARCHER News

Tuesday 19th June 2018

• ARCHER Embedded CSE Call - Open Now
• Performance Comparison Between ARCHER and Tier2 HPC Systems
• Note to Users: Machine Usage at Weekends
• HPC Carpentry, Leeds, 25-26 July 2018
• Webinar: Modern C++ for Computational Scientists - Second Session
• Training : Upcoming ARCHER Training Opportunities

ARCHER Embedded CSE Call - Open Now

We are very pleased to announce that the 13th ARCHER embedded CSE (eCSE) call is now open and proposals are invited up to the deadline of 4pm (UK time) on Tuesday 17th July 2018. Embedded CSE (eCSE) support provides funding for the ARCHER user community to develop software in a sustainable manner for running on ARCHER and future UK Tier-1 services.

More details of how to apply are available by following the link to the eCSE calls page from here: www.archer.ac.uk/community/eCSE/. This also includes details of the application and review process, assessment criteria eligibility, etc.

The 13th eCSE call opened on: 5th June 2018

Deadline for proposals: 1600 BST on Tuesday 17th July 2018.

Proposals received after the deadline cannot be accepted. More information is available from the ARCHER helpdesk (support@archer.ac.uk).

Performance Comparison Between ARCHER and Tier2 HPC Systems

In collaboration with the Tier2 HPC facilities, the ARCHER CSE team have published a report comparing the performance of the different CPU-based national HPC services for a number of different application benchmarks and summarising advice for users on choosing an appropriate facility for their research. The report can be found online at:

github.com/hpc-uk/archer-benchmarks/blob/master/reports/initial_comparison/index.md

This benchmarking activity is ongoing and further reports will be published in the future including additional benchmarks and systems with different architectures. The benchmarking activity is also an open source activity that welcomes contributions. Please have a look at the benchmarking repository at: github.com/hpc-uk/archer-benchmarks/ for more information on how to access the raw benchmarking data and on how to contribute to the activity.

Note to Users: Machine Usage at Weekends

Based on our analysis of ARCHER usage patterns, we have noticed recently that more of the machine is available at weekends. If you have jobs you would like to run, we would recommend scheduling these to begin on a Thursday or Friday, to take advantage of this drop. These jobs are likely to be processed more quickly than those submitted at other times during the week.

HPC Carpentry

This course is aimed at researchers who have little or no experience of using high performance or high throughput computing but are interested to learn how it could help their research, how they could use it and how it provides additional performance. You need to have previous experience working with the Unix Shell. For a brief introduction to bash, you can refer to the Software Carpentry material available online. You don't need to have any previous knowledge of the tools that will be presented at the workshop.

After completing this course, participants will:

• Understand motivations for using HPC in research
• Understand how HPC systems are put together to achieve performance and how they differ from desktops/laptops
• Know how to connect to remote HPC systems and transfer data
• Know how to use a scheduler to work on a shared system
• Be able to use software modules to access different HPC software
• Be able to work effectively on a remote shared resource

Full details at www.archer.ac.uk/training/courses/2018/07/hpc-carpentry-leeds/index.php.

Registration open now.

Webinar: Modern C++ for Computational Scientists - Second Session

Wednesday 27th June 2018 14:00 BST - Note earlier-than-usual start time

Rupert Nash, EPCC, will present a four-part tutorial, over two afternoons, on the use of Modern C++ for Computational Scientists.

* * * Slides and link to the practical materials from the earlier sessions are now available at www.archer.ac.uk/training/virtual/ * * * Video of the session will be available soon.

Since the 2011 revision to the C++ language and standard library, the ways it is now being used are quite different. Used well, these features enable the programmer to write elegant, reusable and portable code that runs efficiently on a variety of architectures.

However, it is still a very large and complex tool. This set of online lectures, delivered over two Wednesday afternoons and including practical exercises, will cover a minimal set of features to allow an experienced non-C++ programmer to get to grips with language. These include: overloading, templates, containers, iterators, lambdas and standard algorithms. It concludes with a brief discussion of modern frameworks for portable parallel performance which are commonly implemented in C++.

The course would appeal to existing C++ programmers wanting to learn techniques that are applicable to numerical computing, or C programmers who want to know what parts of the C++ standard they should prioritise when learning new features.

Details and join link : www.archer.ac.uk/training/virtual

Upcoming Training Opportunities

Registration open now

• Advanced OpenMP Cambridge 17 - 19 July 2018
• HPC Carpentry Leeds 25 - 26 July 2018
• Advanced MPI Milton Keynes 30 - 31 July 2018

ARCHER Summer School

• Hands-on Introduction to HPC Edinburgh 2-3 July 2018
• Message-passing Programming with MPI Edinburgh 4-6 July 2018

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