ARCHER News
Tuesday 2nd April 2019
- ARCHER Programming Environment Update
- EPCC's Women in HPC Chapter Launch
- ARCHER Champions
- ARCHER benchmarks: Single node performance comparison report
- Job-level reporting of I/O use available in SAFE
- EPSRC HPC Impact Survey
- EPSRC Spring 2019 RAP calls
- Performance Analysis Workshop - 24-26 April 2019
- Training : Upcoming ARCHER Training Opportunities
ARCHER Programming Environment Update
We have recently installed the December 2018 Cray Programming Environment release on ARCHER. This means that there are currently three major PE releases on the system: the default is from May 2017 and the release from Dec 2017 is also available.
New releases bring in new features and performance improvements in the compilers, message-passing libraries and associated scientific libraries.
You can experiment with the newer releases by loading convenience modules that pull in consistent sets of modules as follows...
module load cdt/17.12 module load cdt/18.12
More information on the changes that can be expected from a new PE release and information specific to the CCE 8.6 and 8.7 compilers that are available is given in the Cray Programming Environment Webinar which we ran last year.
The recording of the webinar is available here: https://youtu.be/FWbAdS9tlUc
Note that the default modules have not changed.
EPCC's Women in HPC Chapter Launch
St Leonard's, Pollock Halls, University of Edinburgh, 8th May 2019
Registration is free and open to all.
EPCC's Women in HPC Chapter is excited to announce that we will be holding a launch event, to celebrate our recently formed chapter and to engage and develop our Women in HPC community. The chapter has a strong focus on diversity and we are particularly keen that the launch is open and welcoming to all, whether you are interested in becoming a member of the network or simply keen to be an ally and supporter.
The launch is free to attend and will take a workshop approach, with short lightning talks, breakout sessions and opportunities for discussion and networking.
The event will focus on two areas in particular: The first will look at the challenges and opportunities for women to develop their professional skills and profile throughout their careers. Through a series of lightning talks, participants will discuss their experiences and challenges before breaking into discussion groups. The second will focus on celebrating and encouraging diversity in high performance computing and computational science. Opportunities will exist for break out sessions and discussion in areas such as outreach, publicity, recruitment and the working environment.
To register and find out more, please go to: http://www.archer.ac.uk/training/courses/2019/05/190508-WHPC/index.php
ARCHER Champions
We hope you will be able to join us at the next meeting of Champions which will take place in Edinburgh on Thursday 9th May at St Leonards (see: https://www.archer.ac.uk/community/champions/).
The event is co-located with the launch of the EPCC WHPC Chapter.
A draft agenda will be available shortly but registration is now open (http://www.archer.ac.uk/training/registration/index.php).
ARCHER benchmarks: Single node performance comparison report
We have recently published a report comparing the performance of compute nodes on various UK Tier-1 and Tier-2 HPC systems for a number of application benchmarks. Architectures compared in this report cover three generations of Intel Xeon CPUs, Marvell Arm ThunderX2 CPUs and NVidia GPUs. The report will be of interest to users selecting which service to apply for access to under the currently open RAP call that provides access to Tier-1 (ARCHER) and Tier-2 systems. For the full report (hosted on GitHub), see: https://bit.ly/2uBiTyW
Job-level reporting of I/O use available in SAFE
Through a collaboration between the ARCHER CSE team at EPCC and the Cray Centre of Excellence for ARCHER we are pleased to be able to tell you that per-job I/O data is now available through the ARCHER SAFE. You can use SAFE to query your I/O use using the online report at:
https://www.archer.ac.uk/safe/TransitionServlet/ReportTemplate/IOUserReportPublic
The report will provide you with an overview of your jobs' I/O activity in the period selected and also the I/O data for individual jobs run within the selected period. This information should be useful to you in planning your HPC work and gaining a better understanding of the I/O characteristics of your work on ARCHER.
This is our first pass at making this data accessible to users and we would really value your feedback on whether this is useful to you or not and any ideas you have on how we could present the data in a more useful way. Please send any suggestions or comments to the ARCHER helpdesk: support@archer.ac.uk
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 are particularly keen to receive feedback from Industrial users who have so far been under-represented in the responses.
EPSRC Spring 2019 RAP calls
EPSRC Spring 2019 RAP calls for both ARCHER and Tier2 are open
- https://epsrc.ukri.org/funding/calls/rapopenaccesstier2spring20191/
- https://epsrc.ukri.org/funding/calls/archerrapspring2019/
Both calls have a closing date of 4pm on 11th April 2019 for the Technical Assessment form.
Both calls have a closing date of 4pm on 25th April 2019 for final submission.
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, 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
