ARCHER News
Wednesday 24th June 2020
- ARCHER2 A review of OpenFOAM collated I/O performance on ARCHER - today
- HPC Carpentry course
- Supercomputing MOOC
- Other upcoming ARCHER training
ARCHER2 A review of OpenFOAM collated I/O performance on ARCHER
Wednesday 24th June 2020 15:00 - 16:00 BST
Julien Sindt EPCC
OpenFOAM is a widely-used program for performing computational fluid dynamics simulations, and is regularly among the top 20 most-used applications on ARCHER. One historical quirk of OpenFOAM is its need to write a file per variable per MPI-process when running in parallel on multiple processors - this quickly becomes an issue when running simulations on ARCHER or other HPC facilities where the number of processors used is high and the number of files produced can quickly run into the 10,000s-100,000s (and clog up a user’s file number quota). With the release of v1706, the OpenFOAM developers have addressed this by adding an option to have all writing done to a single master file per variable (greatly reducing the total number of files generated). In this talk, I will be comparing the I/O performance of this new, collated writing method with the performance of the file-per-process method. Hopefully, this will help inform OpenFOAM users on ARCHER and elsewhere of the best method to use for their systems.
This online session is open to all.
Join link and full details : https://www.archer2.ac.uk/training/courses/200624-openfoam-io/
HPC Carpentry
David Henty (EPCC), Juan Herrera (EPCC)
29 - 30 June 2020
This course introduces accessing remote advanced computing facilities via the command line and High Performance Computing (HPC). 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.
- Be able to use the Bash command line on remote systems.
- 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.
Prerequisites: There are no prerequisites for this workshop.
Full details and registration link : https://www.archer2.ac.uk/training/courses/200629-hpc-carpentry/
Supercomputing MOOC
Our 5-week online Supercomputing MOOC, developed as part of the PRACE project, started running last week. All material can be accessed for free, although there are paid options if you would like a completion certificate. See https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/supercomputing/.
Note that the MOOC is now running in an "un-facilitated" mode, so although there will be ample opportunity for you to interact with fellow learners there is no hands-on involvement from EPCC staff.
Other upcoming ARCHER2 Training
- Software Packages in HPC with Spack and EasyBuild webinar, Online, Wednesday 17th June 2020 15:00 - 16:00 BST
- A review of OpenFOAM collated I/O performance on ARCHER webinar, Online, Wednesday 24th June 2020 15:00 - 16:00 BST
- HPC Carpentry, Online, 29 - 30 June 2020
- ARCHER2 for software package users, Online, Date to be confirmed
- Introduction to ARCHER2 for software developers, Online, Date to be confirmed
Further details https://www.archer2.ac.uk/training/#upcoming-training
