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ARCHER2 Weekly Newsletter

By ARCHER2 Service on June 29, 2022

Tags: newsletters 

ARM Forge

ARM Forge is now available to ARCHER2 users to help them debug and profile applications at scale. ARM Forge is a suite which includes both the DDT debugger and MAP compiler, along with the perhaps less well-known, Profile Reports tool. The licence allows debugging and profiling on up to 8,192 compute cores (that is, 64 nodes), shared between all users at any one time. Information on how to access ARM Forge is available in the ARCHER2 documentation [https://docs.archer2.ac.uk/data-tools/arm-forge/].

Note: Arm Forge is a commercial package for which CSE has a licence until April 2023. Availability of Forge beyond April 2023 will depend on continued funding for the license. Therefore, please let us know if Arm Forge is useful in your work.

ARCHER2 Annual User Survey 2021-22

Last chance - survey closes tomorrow!

We are committed to continually improving the ARCHER2 Service and would like to request your input to help us understand what is important to you, where the Service is working well and where there is scope for improvement.

The ARCHER2 Annual User Survey consists of just a few questions and should take only a few minutes of your time to complete. There are opportunities to add more detailed comments if you wish.

For each survey response received, we will donate £1 to Save The Children.

We are also offering 5 prizes of 2000 CUs on ARCHER2 for users who complete the survey. Winners can choose to forgo the CU prize and for each winner that does this we will donate a further £20 to Save The Children. Winners will be drawn at random from all respondents who have left contact details after the closing date of Thursday 30th June 2022 and the winners notified by e-mail. The prizes are only available to people with existing ARCHER2 user accounts.

You can find the survey at:

https://bit.ly/ARCHER2-User-Survey-2021-2022

Thank you in advance for taking the time to complete this survey. The responses will be used to try and improve the service for you and to help identify key areas for service development.

Data Carpentry

Online training, 18 - 21 July 2022 09:30 - 13:00 BST

Data Carpentry develops and teaches workshops on the fundamental data skills needed to conduct research. Its target audience is researchers who have little to no prior computational experience, and its lessons are domain specific, building on learners’ existing knowledge to enable them to quickly apply skills learned to their own research. Participants will be encouraged to help one another and to apply what they have learned to their own research problems.

The workshop will cover:

  • Data Organization in Spreadsheets. OpenRefine for Data Cleaning.
  • Introduction to R.
  • Continuation of R: Data analysis and Visualization.
  • Data Management with SQL.

Full details and registration: https://www.archer2.ac.uk/training/courses/220718-data-carpentry/

Performance of different routing protocols on ARCHER2: OpenFabrics and UCX,

Online webinar, Wednesday 20th July 2022 15:00 - 16:00 BST

In this presentation, we report on a comparison on performance between different routing protocols underlying the Cray MPICH library on a HPE Cray EX system for a variety of application and synthetic benchmarks. The ARCHER2 system allows users to select, at runtime, between two different underlying routing protocols: OpenFabrics (OFI) and Mellanox UCX (UCX). The CSE team have compared the performance of OFI and UCX for different applications from a variety of research areas (CASTEP, CP2K, GROMACS, NEMO, OpenSBLI, VASP) and the performance of the OSU MPI benchmarks. We find that the choice of routing protocol can have a profound effect on application performance and that the best choice is dependent on the number of nodes, the application and the benchmark case used for the performance evaluation. This makes providing general advice to users challenging. We summarise the data we have gathered so far and the advice we provide to users; and provide an overview of what future investigations we have planned.

Full details and join link: https://www.archer2.ac.uk/training/courses/220720-routing-protocols-vt/

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

  • Message-passing Programming with MPI, Online, always-open self-service course
  • Shared Memory Programming with OpenMP, Online, always-open self-service course
  • QM/MM with GROMACS + CP2K, Online, Always open - self-service course

  • Data Carpentry, Online, 18 - 21 July 2022 09:30 - 13:00 BST
  • Performance of different routing protocols on ARCHER2: OpenFabrics and UCX, Online, Wednesday 20th July 2022 15:00 - 16:00 BST (Note change of date)
  • Plotting and Programming with Python, Online, 25 July 2022 10:00 - 17:00 BST
  • HPC Carpentry, Online, 26 - 27 July 2022 09:30 - 16:00 BST

Further details 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/