ARCHER News
Tuesday 12th March 2019
- EPSRC HPC Impact Survey
- EPSRC Spring 2019 RAP calls now open
- Implementation of multi-level contact detection in granular LAMMPS to enable efficient polydisperse DEM simulations - webinar Wed 20th March 3pm
- RDF Data Analytic Cluster available
- Performance Analysis Workshop - 24-26 April 2019
- Training : Upcoming ARCHER Training Opportunities
EPSRC HPC Impact Survey
The consultancy London Economics has prepared a survey to be completed by the users (academic and industrial) of EPSRC's investments in HPC over the last decade. This includes both users of the funded hardware and also beneficiaries of any HPC associated software investments (such as for training or software development).
We would like to ask you to complete this survey as soon as possible:
http://surveys.londoneconomics.co.uk/s/3F0IM/
The data collected will be used to support the case for additional funding in the area, potentially as soon as in the spending review expected within the next year. It is crucial that we are able to provide evidence that our past investments in this area have been extremely beneficial to substantiate our argument that this will continue to be the case in the future.
EPSRC Spring 2019 RAP calls now open
EPSRC Spring 2019 RAP calls for both ARCHER and Tier2 are now open
- https://epsrc.ukri.org/funding/calls/rapopenaccesstier2spring20191/
- https://epsrc.ukri.org/funding/calls/archerrapspring2019/
Both calls have a closing date of 4pm on 25th April 2019.
Implementation of multi-level contact detection in granular LAMMPS to enable efficient polydisperse DEM simulations
Free webinar: Wednesday 20th March 3pm
Tom Shire, University of Glasgow
Discrete element modelling (DEM) is a computational tool for predicting how granular materials will respond during loading, flowing or other processes found in nature or in industry. Each grain in a system is modelled as an individual element, and the elements interact to model to overall system response. The most time consuming parts of a DEM simulation are calculating which grains are in contact with each other and communicating this information between processors when running simulations in parallel. In most DEM codes these stages become prohibitively time consuming when a wide range of particles are employed, as the number of potential inter-particle contacts dramatically increases.
This eCSE project has implemented an improved contact detection scheme for DEM simulations of materials with a wide range of particle sizes into LAMMPS, a widely used open-source software which is especially efficient for massively parallel simulations which can be run using supercomputers such as ARCHER. The new scheme limits the search range over which particle-contacts must be checked by defining different ranges depending on the size of particles - e.g. potential contacts between two large particles use a larger search area than between a small and large or two small particles. This webinar will introduce the basics of DEM and the new method to improve detection for polydisperse materials. Following this preliminary results and future plans will be discussed.
Details and join link: http://www.archer.ac.uk/training/virtual/index.php
RDF Data Analytic Cluster available
The RDF DAC is available again after being rebooted yesterday and tested today.
Users are reminded use the cluster compute nodes, not the login node, to run their large computations and data processing (see http://www.archer.ac.uk/documentation/rdf-guide/cluster.php#jobs for guidance on submitting jobs).
In addition, the OMP_NUM_THREADS environment variable should be set to 1 on the login node, and set appropriately in job scripts. You can add the line
export OMP_NUM_THREADS=1
in your ~/.bashrc file to ensure the default value is 1. (For other shells, use the corresponding command.)
Performance Analysis Workshop
Wednesday 24th - Friday 26th April 2019 at University of Bristol
This hands-on course covers the use of a range of modern tools designed to help you understand and improve the performance of parallel programs. Attendees are encouraged to bring along their own applications, and coaching will be available to help you analyse your own programs which may suggest opportunities for improving performance and scalability.
Practicals can be undertaken on Isambard, the new ARM-based Cray Tier-2 system, or on the ARCHER national supercomputer. Accounts will be provided for all attendees.
Full details and registration : https://events.prace-ri.eu/event/867/
Upcoming Training Opportunities
Registration open now
- Message-passing Programming with MPI, Online, Wednesday Afternoons, 20, 27 Feb, 6 & 20 Mar
- Implementation of multi-level contact detection in granular LAMMPS to enable efficient polydisperse DEM simulations, Online webinar, Wednesday 20th March 2019 15:00
- Threaded programming, Southamption, 2-4 April 2019
- Message-passing Programming with MPI, Southampton, 24-26 April 2019
- Performance Analysis Workshop, Bristol, 24-26 April 2019
- Introduction to Code_Saturne Manchester 19-20 June 2019
- ARCHER Summer School 2019
- Hands-on Introduction to HPC, EPCC, Edinburgh, 15-16 July 2019
- Message-passing Programming with MPI, EPCC, Edinburgh, 17-19 July 2019
Full details and registration at http://www.archer.ac.uk/training/index.php
