Andy Turner's blog

Back in February, I reviewed the usage of different research software on ARCHER over a large period of its life. Now we have just come to the end of the first month of charged use on the ARCHER2 4-cabinet system I thought it would be interesting to have an initial look at how people are using the new system in terms of research software use and job sizes.

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.

HPC-UK is a community resource that brings together information to support researchers using HPC, and the people (such as research software engineers) who support those researchers. It provides a coherent view of what is available, how to access it, where to get training, and how to get the most out of HPC applications.

EPCC has received £2.4m from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) as part its £20m investment in six new Tier-2 HPC centres.

ARCHER (Advanced Research Computing High End Resource) is the next national HPC service for academic research. The service comprises a number of components: accommodation provided by the University of Edinburgh; hardware by Cray; systems support by EPCC and Daresbury Laboratory; and user and computational science and engineering support by EPCC.

What sort of research is the HECToR supercomputing facility used for and what simulation software does it make use of?

EPCC measures the use of different simulation codes used on the HECToR facility to get an idea of which codes are used most and what size of jobs different code are used for. In this post I will take a look at which codes are used most on the facility and speculate whether we can infer anything from the patterns we see.