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ARCHER2 Weekly Newsletter

By ARCHER2 Service on September 29, 2021

Tags: newsletters 

ARCHER2 Maintenance - Thursday 30th September

Reminder that ARCHER compute nodes will be unavailable from 08:30 on Thursday for a switch reboot. User access nodes will remain available. Full details on Status page.

ARCHER2 Image and Video Competition 2021

The ARCHER2 Image and Video Competition is your chance to win prizes of £150 for each of

  • Best Image
  • Best Video
  • Best entry from an Early-career researcher

Plus a bonus prize of £100 for the best overall entry from the above three winners.

Show us how you demonstrate “ARCHER/ARCHER2 Enabling Research”

Full details and entry form at https://www.archer2.ac.uk/community/image-comp/

Closing date : Extended to 17th October 2021

Name change for ARCHER2 4 Cabinet System

The name for the ARCHER2 4 Cabinet service is being changed to login-4c.archer2.ac.uk.

This is to allow login.archer2.ac.uk to be used for the full ARCHER2 23 Cabinet service when the service opens. login.archer2.ac.uk will soon cease to function for the 4 cabinet service so please change to using login-4c.archer2.ac.uk now.

  • login-4c.archer2.ac.uk - ARCHER2 4 Cabinet Service
  • login.archer2.ac.uk – Full ARCHER2 Service (when the service opens)

ARCHER2 Embedded CSE (eCSE) and Early Career eCSE Panel Observers calls

ARCHER2 Embedded CSE (eCSE) call

We are very pleased to announce that the 5th ARCHER2 eCSE call (ARCHER2 eCSE05) is now open for proposals. The deadline for submitting documents for technical evaluation is 16:00 on 5 October 2021 with the final deadline for proposal submission being 16:00 on 26 October 2021.

Embedded CSE (eCSE) support provides funding to the ARCHER2 user community to develop software in a sustainable manner to run on theARCHER2 system. For this call software which results in research which is within the remit of EPSRC is eligible. Funding can be requested for staff located at the institution of the PI, third parties, or can include staff from the centralised CSE support team or a mixture of the above. Proposals may request effort from between 1 and 12 person months (inclusive).

More details of how to apply are available by following the link to the eCSE calls page from here

https://www.archer2.ac.uk/ecse/

together with details of the application and review process, assessment criteria eligibility, etc.

ARCHER2 Early Career eCSE Panel Observers call

The eCSE Panel Meeting is the meeting where eCSE proposals are reviewed and decisions are made on which proposals to fund. As part of our commitment to encouraging and developing Early Career Researchers, we are offering a small number of places to such researchers to attend the eCSE panel meeting as Early Career Observers. The aim is to give Early Career Researchers a better insight into this competitive selection process, to assist them in the preparation of future funding proposals.

The deadline for applying to attend the panel meeting as an observer is 16:00 on 5 Oct 2021 and details of the call are given here:

https://www.archer2.ac.uk/ecse/observers/

eCSE call dates

  • Deadline for submitting eCSE05 documents for technical evaluation: 16:00 on Tuesday 5 October 2021
  • Deadline for applications to the observer call: 16:00 on Tuesday 5 October 2021
  • Deadline for final eCSE05 submission: 16:00 Tuesday 26 October 2021
  • A recent webinar can be found here:
    https://www.archer2.ac.uk/training/courses/210203-ecse-webinar/
    which includes a walk through of the submission of a proposal.

HPC-Europa3 Transnational Access visitor programme

FINAL call for applications: closing date 11th November 2021.

HPC-Europa3 funds collaborative research visits for computational scientists in any discipline which can use High Performance Computing (HPC). Visits can currently be made to research institutes in Finland, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain or the UK. UK-based researchers can benefit in two ways: either by visiting a research group elsewhere in Europe, or by hosting a research visitor from another country.

What does HPC-Europa3 provide?

  • Funding for travel, living and accommodation expenses for visits of up to 13 weeks.
  • Access to world-class High Performance Computing (HPC) facilities.
  • Technical support to help you make best use of the HPC systems.
  • Collaborative environment with an expert in your field of research.

Who can apply?

  • Researchers of all levels, from postgraduate to full professors.
  • Researchers from academia or industry.
  • Researchers currently working in a European Union country or Associated State (see http://bit.ly/AssociatedStates for full list of Associated States).
  • Researchers may not visit a group in the country where they currently work.
  • A small number of places may be available for researchers working outside these countries - please contact staff@hpc-europa.org for more information.

How do I apply?

Apply online at http://www.hpc-europa.org by 11th November 2021.

This is the FINAL closing date for applications under HPC-Europa3.

Applicants should receive the selection panel’s decision in late December, so visits should be planned for no earlier than mid-January. However, ALL visits must be complete by 30th April 2022, when the programme ends.

For more information and to apply online, visit: http://www.hpc-europa.org/

For overview videos and interviews with recent visitors, see: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9uOpFQGP9V0TQPXFUOgs_A/playlists

Follow HPC-Europa3 on Twitter for project news: https://twitter.com/HPCEuropa3

First year of the ARCHER2 training service: a retrospective and forward look

Online webinar, Wednesday 29th September 2021 15:00 - 16:00 BST

The ARCHER2 training service started in April 2020 with an online programme of courses and virtual tutorials. In this virtual tutorial, we will present our experience in delivering online courses and designing a training programme based on the feedback received by users and HPC Training experts around the world. We will also announce our training plans for the rest of the second year of service.

This online session is open to all. It will use the Zoom platform.

Full details and join link https://www.archer2.ac.uk/training/#upcoming-training

Advanced OpenMP

Online - 5 and 8 October 2021 09:00 - 17:00 GMT

OpenMP is the industry standard for shared-memory programming, which enables serial programs to be parallelised using compiler directives.This course is aimed at programmers seeking to deepen their understanding of OpenMP and explore some of its more recent and advanced features.

This course will cover topics including nested parallelism, OpenMP tasks, the OpenMP memory model, performance tuning, hybrid OpenMP + MPI, OpenMP implementations, and recently added features in OpenMP.

Hands-on practical programming exercises make up a significant, and integral, part of this course.

Attendees should be familiar with the basics of OpenMP, including parallel regions, data scoping, work sharing directives and synchronisation constructs. Access will be given to appropriate hardware for all the exercises, although many of them can also be performed on a standard Linux laptop.

Furll details and registration https://www.archer2.ac.uk/training/#upcoming-training

Cirrus: Accelerated Computing Resource for Researchers

Online webinars, Tuesdays 5th and 12th October 2021 14:00 - 15:00 BST

Not ARCHER2 training but likely to be of interest to ARCHER2 users.

Paul Graham, Senior Solutions Architect, NVIDIA

Cirrus is the high performance computing and data science service hosted and run by EPCC at The University of Edinburgh. It now has a GPU partition with 38 x 4-GPU nodes providing a fantastic resource for accelerating research. The goal of the two sessions is to give an overview of some of the ways and best practices to take advantage of GPUs via both traditional HPC simulation and new approaches to research using artificial intelligence and data science. No previous GPU knowledge is assumed, target audience is research software engineers and researchers interested in using GPUs.

Each session is self-contained, i.e. attendance at session 1 not necessary for session 2.

  • Session 1: Making efficient use of GPUs for High Performance Computing
  • Session 2: AI & Data Science – tools and frameworks

Full details https://www.cirrus.ac.uk/events/

Introduction to CP2K

Online 11 - 12 October 2021 13:00 - 16:00 BST

CP2K is a quantum chemistry package for performing atomistic simulations which has a variety of applications and features. CP2K is used for wide variety of systems such as solid-state systems, molecules, liquids and biological systems. It is optimized for using density functional theory (DFT) with the mixed Gaussian and Plane-Waves (GPW) method based on pseudopotentials.

This course is designed to teach attendees how to run basic CP2K calculations and give them the key knowledge required for doing so. It will cover the important options in the CP2K input file and how to set up a CP2K calculation before going through some hands-on practical exercises.

Full details and registration https://www.archer2.ac.uk/training/#upcoming-training

ARCHER2 for Software Developers

Online 18 - 19 October 2021 10:00 - 16:00 BST

The lesson aims to answer the following questions:

  • What hardware is available on ARCHER2?
    • What does they consist of (login nodes, compute nodes, file systems, backup)?
    • How does this impact me as a user?
  • How can I access ARCHER2 interactively and transfer data?
  • What does the ARCHER2 application development environment look like and how do I use it?
  • How do I write job submission scripts and submit them to the ARCHER2 scheduler?
  • How can I be a good ARCHER2 citizen?
  • How can I check what resources I am using and look at historical usage?

Target Audience:

This lesson provides an introduction to using ARCHER2 for user who:

  • have already used other HPC systems; and
  • want to compile (and possibly) develop HPC software on ARCHER2.

Prerequisites:

You should have used remote HPC facilities before. In particular, you should be happy with connecting using SSH, know what a batch scheduling system is and be familiar with using the Linux command line. You should also be happy editing plain text files in a remote terminal (or, alternatively, editing them on your local system and copying them to the remote HPC system using scp). Finally, you should be comfortable with compiling parallel HPC source code that uses MPI and OpenMP.

Full details and registration https://www.archer2.ac.uk/training/#upcoming-training

CompBioMed’s 18th e-seminar

6 October 2021 at 3pm CEST Focus on High Performance Containers

Not part of ARCHER2 but may be of interest to ARCHER2 users.

Further details https://www.compbiomed.eu/compbiomed-e-seminar-18/

Upcoming ARCHER2 Training

  • First year of the ARCHER2 training service: a retrospective and forward look, Online Webinar, Wednesday 29th September 2021 15:00 - 16:00 BST
  • Advanced OpenMP, Online, 5 and 8 October 2021 09:00 - 17:00 BST
  • Introduction to CP2K, Online, 11 - 12 October 2021 13:00 - 16:00 BST
  • ARCHER2 for Software Developers, Online, 18 - 19 October 2021 10:00 - 16:00 BST
  • Understanding Package Performance, Online, 28 October 2021 09:30 - 16:30 BST
  • Message-passing Programming with MPI, Online, always-open self-service course
  • Shared Memory Programming with OpenMP, Online, always-open self-service course

Further details https://www.archer2.ac.uk/training/#upcoming-training

New virtual tutorials will be announced soon via: ARCHER2 website: https://www.archer2.ac.uk/training/#upcoming-training

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ARCHER2_HPC

Recordings of past courses and virtual tutorials can be found here: https://www.archer2.ac.uk/training/materials/