ARCHER News
Wednesday 8th July 2020
- Cirrus Phase II - using the new Cirrus system webinar
- HPC Certification webinar
- SORSE (a Series of Online Research Software Events)
- Apply for HPC access for COVID-19 research via the COVID-19 HPC Consortium
- Other upcoming ARCHER training
Cirrus Phase II - using the new Cirrus system
Wednesday 15th July 2020 15:00 - 16:00 BST
Kevin Stratford EPCC
Cirrus is a UK Tier 2 service funded by EPSRC and is aimed at users with computational requirements that fall between University-level resources, and the National Service Archer.
An upgraded Cirrus system was returned to service in June with a number of significant changes. The Cirrus service consists of
- 280 standard compute nodes each with Intel Xeon (Broadwell) 36 cores 256 GB
- 36 new GPU nodes each housing 4 NVIDIA V100s
This talk will give an overview of the important features of the new system, including
- How to get access to Cirrus
- Logging in and the user environment
- Submitting jobs using the Slurm scheduling system and queue policy
- Using the GPU nodes
and will be of interest to both new users and existing users wanting to refresh their knowledge of the system.
This online session is open to all. It will use the Blackboard Collaborate platform.
Full details and join link : https://www.archer2.ac.uk/training/#upcoming-training
HPC Certification webinar
Wednesday 22nd July 2020 15:00 - 16:00 BST
Julian Kunkel, University of Reading
The HPC community has always considered the training of new and existing HPC practitioners to be of high importance to its growth. The significance of training will increase even further in the era of Exascale when HPC encompasses even more scientific disciplines. This diversification of HPC practitioners challenges the traditional training approaches, which are not able to satisfy the specific needs of users, often coming from non-traditionally HPC disciplines and only interested in learning a particular set of skills. HPC centres are struggling to identify and overcome the gaps in users' knowledge.
How should we support prospective and existing users who are not aware of their own knowledge gaps?
The goals of the HPC Certification Forum are:
- Standardizing the HPC knowledge representation into fine-grained competences
- Establishing international recognized certificates attesting knowledge
- Supporting an ecosystem around the HPC competences
This talk introduces the HPC Certification Forum and gives an overview of its activities and status.
This online session is open to all.
Join link and full details : https://www.archer2.ac.uk/training/courses/200624-openfoam-io/
SORSE (Series of Online Research Software Events)
Missing those RSE Conferences this year?
The international RSE community have launched SORSE (a Series of Online Research Software Events) today. Our international answer to the COVID-19-induced cancellation of many national RSE conferences. Get involved in this new initiative created by a truly international committee!
To keep us all connected, collaborating and learning until the 2021 RSE Conferences, a wonderful group of volunteers has created this new series that aims to deliver a weekly event, either a talk, a workshop, a panel, a poster session, a software demo etc from the community. This is an open call to all RSEs and anyone involved with research software, worldwide, to submit an abstract - https://sorse.github.io/programme/call-for-contributions/
The call will be open continuously with rolling deadlines. The first deadline is soon (12th July) and then again on the 31st July, followed by the end of each month after that. Apply at any time and you'll be included in the next review.
Have an idea and want to collaborate on it? - Go to the Topic Bazaar - https://sorse.github.io/programme/bazaar/ - The topic bazaar is a place to encourage and create collaborations that can then be presented in a variety of formats within the series.
Want to have a say on the conference content? Go to the Wishlist - https://sorse.github.io/programme/wishlist/ and tell us what events and guest speakers you'd like to see.
More info: https://sorse.github.io/
HPC access for COVID-19 research via the COVID-19 HPC Consortium
Fighting COVID-19 will require extensive research in areas like bioinformatics, epidemiology, and molecular modelling to understand the threat we're facing and form strategies to address it. This work demands a massive amount of computational capacity. The COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium (https://covid19-hpc-consortium.org/) helps aggregate computing capabilities from the world's most powerful and advanced computers (including UK resources such as ARCHER) to help COVID-19 researchers execute complex computational research programs to help fight the virus.
Researchers are invited to submit COVID-19 related research proposals to the consortium via this online portal (https://covid19-hpc-consortium.org/submit-proposal), which will then be reviewed for matching with computing resources from one of the partner institutions. An expert panel comprised of top scientists and computing researchers will work with proposers to assess the public health benefit of the work, with emphasis on projects that can ensure rapid results. The call works with a rolling submission process rather than a specific deadline to allow researchers to submit their proposals whenever they are ready.
More info: https://covid19-hpc-consortium.org/
Detailed application information: https://www.xsede.org/covid19-hpc-consortium
Other upcoming ARCHER2 Training
- Cirrus Phase II - using the new Cirrus system, Online, Wednesday 15th July 2020 15:00 - 16:00 BST
- HPC Certification, Online, Wednesday 22nd July 2020 15:00 - 16:00 BST
- 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
