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ARCHER2 Weekly Newsletter

By ARCHER2 Service on October 18, 2023

Tags: newsletters 

Access to HPC call open

EPSRC Access to HPC call has been opened this week.

Deadline for submission of TAs is 17 November 2023 16:00 and the closing date for applications is 1 December 2023 16:00.

Details including the Technical Assessment form can be found on our Access page

Full call details on the UKRI site

ARCHER2 User Survey 2023

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.

Complete the survey

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.

Single Node Performance Optimisation

Online, 23 - 24 November 2023 09:30 - 16:30 GMT

This course covers techniques for improving the performance of parallel applications by optimising of the code that runs within each node.

Modern HPC systems such as ARCHER2 are being constructed using increasingly powerful nodes, with larger and larger numbers of cores and enhanced vector capabilities. To extract maximum performance from applications, it is therefore necessary to understand, and be able to overcome, on-node performance bottlenecks. This course will cover the main features of modern HPC nodes, including multiple cores, vector floating point units, deep cache hierarchies, and NUMA memory systems. We will cover techniques for efficient programming of these features, using batch processing options and compiler options as well as hand tuning of code. The course will also contain an introduction to the use of Cray performance analysis tools.

Participants must have attended ARCHER2 for Software Developers or be familiar with software development on ARCHER, ARCHER2, or any other HPC facility, using C, C++ or Fortran.

This course is targeted at users interested in optimising the performance of their own applications, e.g. through compiler options or code changes.

Users interested in efficient use of centrally installed packages should consider attending Understanding Package Performance instead

Full details and regsitration

Efficient Parallel IO

Online, 1 November 2023 09:30 - 16:30 GMT

One of the greatest challenges to running parallel applications on large numbers of processors is how to handle file IO. Standard Unix IO routines are not designed with parallelism in mind, and IO overheads can grow to dominate the overall runtime. Parallel file systems are optimised for large volumes of data, but performance can be far from optimal if every process opens its own file or if all IO is funnelled through a single controller process.

This hands-on course explores a range of issues related to parallel IO. It uses ARCHER2 and its parallel Lustre file system as a platform for the exercises; however, almost all the IO concepts and performance considerations are applicable to any parallel system.

Full details and regsitration

Containers and Cloud-HPC for Virtual Human Twin

CompBioMed’s e-seminar on 26 October 2023 1pm BST

Full details

May be of interest to ARCHER2 users.

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