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ARCHER2 Weekly Newsletter

By ARCHER2 Service on August 6, 2025

Tags: newsletters 

Advanced Computing Facility (ACF) Power Outage: Friday 29th August - Monday 15th September

Due to a significant Health and Safety risk, associated with our power supply to the site, that requires action at the ACF, there will be a full power outage to the site from Friday 29th August - Monday 15th September. Specialised external contractors will be working on a 24/7 basis for the outage period replacing switchgear.

ARCHER2 User Impact

ARCHER2 will be completely powered off for the duration of this period.

Users will not be able to connect to ARCHER2 and will not be able to access data on any of the ARCHER2 file systems. The system will be drained of jobs ahead of the power outage and jobs will not run during this period. Any queued jobs will remain in the queue during the outage and jobs will start once the service is returned.

SAFE and the ARCHER2 website will be available during the outage period so users can continue to contact us and we will be providing updates during the outage on the Status page.

We will notify users once the service is available and we expect this to be on Monday 15th September.

We apologise for the inconvenience of this essential outage. Please contact support@archer2.ac.uk if you have any questions.

ARCHER2 Image and Video competition 2025

Share your images and videos to support excellence and promote the contribution of ARCHER2 to outstanding research. The winner of the competition will be awarded £250.

The winning image or video, along with a selection of other entries, will also be featured on the ARCHER2 website and in EPCC and ARCHER2 publications. Credit will be given to the entrant in all cases. Key Details

  • Competition Opens: 29th July 2025
  • Submission Deadline: 5 September 2025
  • Judging: September/October 2025
  • Prizes:
    • Best image : £150
    • Best video : £150
    • Best early career researcher submission : £150
    • Overall winner, selected from the above three winners : additional £100

The ARCHER2 Image and Video Competition is an event for all users of ARCHER2 to share their images or videos of “ARCHER2 Enabling Research”

Full details and entry forms

Measuring hardware performance counters on ARCHER2 using LIKWID

Free webinar, Thursday 7th August 15:00 - 16:00

In this webinar members of the ARCHER2 CSE team will show how the LIKWID toolsuite can be used to quantify application performance by measuring hardware performance counters and using metrics such as FLOPS, memory bandwidth, cache misses, etc.

We will show how to perform measurements of MPI and/or thread parallel applications on ARCHER2 and relate these to realistic peak hardware capabilities obtained by running LIKWID microbenchmarks.

This webinar should be of interest to anyone wanting to assess how well an application exploits ARCHER2 node-level hardware, including through construction of a roofline plot.

Full details and join link

Message Passing programming with MPI

Leeds, 18 - 19 August 09:30 - 17:00 (face to face), Wednesday 27th August 14:00 - 16:30 (online)

The world’s largest supercomputers are used almost exclusively to run applications which are parallelised using Message Passing. The course covers all the basic knowledge required to write parallel programs using this programming model, and is directly applicable to almost every parallel computer architecture.

Parallel programming by definition involves co-operation between processors to solve a common task. The programmer has to define the tasks that will be executed by the processors, and also how these tasks are to synchronise and exchange data with one another. In the message-passing model the tasks are separate processes that communicate and synchronise by explicitly sending each other messages. All these parallel operations are performed via calls to some message-passing interface that is entirely responsible for interfacing with the physical communication network linking the actual processors together. This course uses the de facto standard for message passing, the Message Passing Interface (MPI). It covers point-to-point communication, non-blocking operations, derived datatypes, virtual topologies, collective communication and general design issues.

The course is delivered in an intensive two-day face-to-face format using EPCC’s dedicated training facilities, followed by a half-day online follow up session. It is taught using a variety of methods including formal lectures, practical exercises, programming examples and informal tutorial discussions. This enables lecture material to be supported by the tutored practical sessions in order to reinforce the key concepts.

Full details and registration

Introduction to Data Science & Machine Learning

University College London, 12 - 13 August 2025 10:00 - 16:00 BST

This course will introduce Data Science and Machine Learning and discuss how they are related. After a short introduction to Data Science in more general terms, the course will focus more specifically on Machine Learning.

We will introduce the ideas of Unsupervised and Supervised Learning, starting with some simple examples, building things up so that by the end of the course you should have some understanding of how Neural Networks work under the hood.

The primary goal of the course is to show you the kind of things that can be done with machine learning and give an outline of how these things are implemented. In practice, as a user, you will almost certainly end up using libraries and frameworks which implement the details for you, and we’ll give you some examples of these libraries and frameworks.

We won’t be able to make you machine learning experts in the space of two days, but hopefully after the end of the course, you’ll understand the important ideas, and have a base from which to explore those areas of Machine Learning that are relevant to your research domains. We also won’t get to the point where we can cover Machine Learning at scale on systems like ARCHER. That is for another day… Prerequisites:

The practical exercises on the course will use Python, and we’ll expect you to be comfortable with the fundamentals of programming in Python if you want to do the practical exercises.

Full details and registration

NetDRIVE Second Call for Community Projects and Champions

The NetDRIVE 2nd call for community projects has been published, offering over £1m for activities contributing towards sustainable research computing for UKRI:

  • Guidance and application forms
  • The total budget for community projects will be £1m (100% FEC, with projects being awarded 80% FEC).
  • The 2nd call will have two components: around 20% of funds will be reserved for projects led by early career applicants (submissions of full proposals close October 24th , but applications to join a sandpit event should be submitted by September 10th) and the remainder will be open to all (submissions close October 10th).
  • There is also funding in this call for 3 champions with social science qualifications, with two of these positions reserved for early career applicants.

7th HPC-AI Advisory Council UK conference – Leicester, 14/15 October 2025

Registration for the 7th HPC-AI Advisory Council UK Conference, taking place in Leicester on 14/15 October is now open

Places are limited, so if you’re interested in attending, please sign up soon.

This year’s conference theme, “Trustworthy Compute,” focuses on building a computing ecosystem that the community, and society at large, can depend on. From the reliability of simulation and AI outcomes to uncertainty quantification, AI safety, and sustainable, resilient infrastructure on a range of scales across a heterogeneous computing ecosystem, we’ll explore what it takes to ensure computing practices and systems are both credible and responsible. We’ll also examine how career paths for Research Technical Professionals can evolve to reflect their central role in delivering impact through HPC and AI.

If you would like to speak at this event, the call for abstracts is also open with a closing date of 6th August. Talks on any topics related to HPC and/or AI are welcome.

Recently added known issues

The “Known Issues” page of the ARCHER2 Documentation https://docs.archer2.ac.uk/known-issues/ lists all current open known issues including a description of the issue, its symptoms and any work-arounds.

No recent issues.

Upcoming ARCHER2 Training

Further details of upcoming training

We always welcome researchers wishing to present their work in a webinar - please contact the Service Desk if you would be interested in presenting your work.

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Recordings of past courses

Recordings of past virtual tutorials