ARCHER2 Weekly Newsletter


EXTENDED: ARCHER2 Image and Video competition 2024

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: 22nd July 2024
  • Submission Deadline: 17 September 2024
  • Judging: September/October 2024
  • 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

Capability Days

The third ARCHER2 Capability Days session will run from 24-26 September 2024. ARCHER2 Capability Days are a mechanism to allow users to run large scale tests on the system free of charge. The motivations behind Capability Days are:

  • Enhancing world-leading science from ARCHER2 by enabling modelling and simulation at scales that are not otherwise possible.
  • Enabling capability use cases that are not possible on other UK HPC services.
  • Providing a facility that can be used to test scaling to help prepare software and communities for future exascale resources.

Capability Days are made up of three parts:

  • 0800-2000 BST, 24 September 2024 - pre-Capability Days session (pre-capabilityday QoS) to allow users to test scaling and job setup ahead of full Capability Day
    • Supports jobs 256-1024 nodes, 20 min maximum run time
    • Jobs are uncharged
  • 0800-1600 BST, 24 Sep 2024 - NERCcapability reservation to allow NERC users to test scaling
    • Only available to users in NERC projects
    • Supports up to 1024 nodes
    • Jobs are uncharged
  • 2000 BST, 24 September - 1400 BST, 26 September 2024 - Capability Days session (capabilityday QoS)
    • Supports jobs 512-4096 nodes, 1 hour maximum run time
    • Jobs are uncharged

For all Capability Days QoS/reservation jobs can be submitted ahead of time and will start when the session starts.

A full description of the Capability Days, including example job submission scripts can be found in the ARCHER2 Documentation at: ARCHER2 Capability Days

UKRI are advertising for new members of the ARCHER2 User Advisory Group

Please follow this link for more details on how to apply

The 2nd GPU eCSE software development call

GPU eCSE support provides funding to the UKRI research community to develop software in a sustainable manner to run on GPU-based architectures. We invite proposals to develop software that facilitates research targeted at UKRI’s digital research infrastructure e.g. future Exascale supercomputing services, UK national AI services, national Tier-2 HPC services. The call is open to research across all of UKRI’s remit.

The 2nd GPU eCSE call (GPU-eCSE02) opened on the 2 July 2024. The final deadline for proposal submission is 16:00 on 17 September 2024 via the ARCHER2 SAFE. Please note that for this call there is no separate technical evaluation stage or separate technical evaluation form. Funding will enable the employment of an RSE (a Research Software Engineer, PDRA or equivalent) to work specifically on the relevant software to enable new features or improve the performance of the software to be run on GPU-based architectures. Funding can be requested for up to 24 person months of effort per project for a duration of up to 2 calendar years. There is flexibility in the way the effort is requested. For example, a project may have more than one person working on it or the effort could be spread over a greater number of calendar months, i.e. a staff member could work on the project at less than 100% alongside other commitments or it could be worked on by a staff member who doesn’t work full time. Please just get in contact with the ARCHER2 Service Desk (support@archer2.ac.uk) if you wish to discuss possible scenarios. Projects are expected to start between 1 January and 1 July 2025, and be completed by 31 March 2027. Funding can be requested for staff located at the institution of the PI, third parties, or can include staff from the ARCHER2 centralised CSE support team at EPCC or a mixture of the above.

Projects may utilise the GPU component of ARCHER2 or other suitable GPU resources to complete the technical work. If the proposal plans to use the GPU component of ARCHER2, successful projects will be given access to these resources. If projects plan to utilise other systems, you should ensure you have suitable resources available to complete the project successfully. Please contact and arrange this access with the relevant service provider before submission.

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

Deadline for final GPU-eCSE02 submission: 16:00 on 17 Sep 2024 (via the ARCHER2 SAFE)

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