HPC

In this blog post I consider how we (as the UK HPC community) could create a community HPC technical knowledge base that would allow us to share and reuse useful technical information. Much of these thoughts came out of discussions at the HPC Champions meeting that took place on 16 September 2019 alongside the UK RSE Conference 2019 in Birmingham, UK along with subsequent discussions at the monthly HPC RSE calls.

Selfish performance

Sharing of resources has challenges for the performance and scaling of large parallel applications. In the NEXTGenIO project we have been focusing specifically on I/O and data management/storage costs, working from the realisation that current filesystems will struggle to efficiently load and store data from millions of processes or tasks all requesting different data sets or bits of information.

We are embarking on a survey of the HPC environment and would appreciate your input! Jean-Thomas Acquaviva, DDN Storage, explains the background below.

Supercomputers are helping us to solve the world greatest challenges but who is helping us to harness the computational power of supercomputers?

The HPC Certification Forum is a community effort that aims to provide an international certification programme for the skills needed by practitioners  to harness supercomputers. It aims to clearly categorise, define, and examine competencies, which will be beneficial to all stake-holders involved in training and education. To make this effort relevant to the whole HPC community, a number of online surveys and polls will be created to capture and estimate the importance of the various tools, technologies, and skills expected from HPC practitioners. 

Pablo C. Cañizares came on an HPC-Europa3 visit to EPCC from 23 July–24 October 2018. In this blog article he summarises his visit.

Hi there! I'm Pablo C. Cañizares, a PhD student in Computer Science from the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM), Spain. I work in the Design and Testing of Reliable Systems group in the Computer Science Faculty of the UCM. I visited EPCC for three months under the HPC-Europa3 transnational access programme and was hosted by EPCC's Dr David Henty.

With jobs submitted to a batch system, supercomputing has traditionally been centred around an offline, non-interactive approach to running codes such as simulations. However, it is our belief that there is great potential in fusing HPC with real-time data for use as part of urgent decision-making processes in response to natural disasters and crises.

The closing date for our Highly Skilled Workforce scholarships, open to Scottish and EU students, has been extended to May 28th. Scholarship applications should be made after completion of an MSc application. See https://www.ed.ac.uk/studying/postgraduate/applying/.

We also have a scholarship for the MSc in HPC with Data Science programme that is provided by the Registers of Scotland. The closing date is May 21st - see https://www.ed.ac.uk/student-funding/postgraduate/uk-eu/science-engineering/informatics/registers-of-scotland

Both the above have nationality restrictions - our own John Fisher scholarships are open to all. See https://www.ed.ac.uk/student-funding/postgraduate/uk-eu/science-engineering/informatics/masters-hpc

You can see details of both HPC Masters courses at the Computing and Informatics web page.

This is a very exciting time for the MSc in HPC programmes. Our current students are halfway through their second semester of courses and are already starting work on developing their dissertation projects, while EPCC staff are looking forward to our summer move into the new Bayes Building. Located in the University's central area, this move will strengthen our existing collaborations with the School of Informatics.

The programme's Third Call for applicants is now open. It will close on Wednesday 28th February 2018.

The interdisciplinary HPC-Europa programme, which provides access to some of Europe’s top HPC facilities, is now running again. The programme pays travel and living costs for short collaborative research visits to a scientific host in another country. Applications can be submitted at any time, with four closing dates per year.

Dr Elsa Gonsiorowski is visiting EPCC from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California, this week. Dr Gonsiorowski is working closely with EPCC's David Henty on various parallel I/O research topics. In this post she introduces her work.

Last month I attended a collaboration workshop in Japan between the Centre for Computational Sciences (CCS) at the University of Tsukuba and EPCC. I was talking about the INTERTWinE project, which addresses the problem of programming-model design and implementation for the Exascale, and specifically our work on the specification and implementation of a resource manager and directory/cache.