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ARCHER2 Weekly Newsletter

By ARCHER2 Service on July 16, 2025

Tags: newsletters 

ARCHER2 User Survey 2025

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 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. Additionally, if you enter your ARCHER2 username in the final question, then you will be entered into the prize draw to win one of five £50 Amazon vouchers.

Complete the survey

Survey closes at the end of July - please do take the time to give us your feedback.

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.

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.

Advanced MPI

Online, 29 - 30 July 2025 10:00 - 16:00

This course is aimed at programmers seeking to deepen their understanding of MPI and also explore some of its more recent and advanced features.

The most recent MPI standard, MPI 5.0 approved on 5th June 2025, runs to over 1000 pages and includes a huge number of functions. Even the most basic of MPI operations, such as a matching pair of MPI_Send / MPI Recv calls, can be implemented in surprisingly complicated ways; a simple question such as “what happens if I post a send and there is no receive” may not have a simple answer! An understanding of how the MPI library is implemented in practice can therefore be useful for users wanting to achieve optimal performance.

To help ensure that we cover the topics that are of most interest to attendees, you will receive a short questionnaire after registration asking to rank your interest in the following topics:

  • Interactive (and fun!) quiz on basics of MPI
  • History and development of MPI
  • How MPI implementation details affect performance
  • Advanced collectives: use of derived datatypes and neighbourhood collectives
  • MPI Shared Memory Model (MPI equivalent of OpenMP shared arrays)
  • General tips and tricks for MPI programming
  • Hybrid MPI+OpenMP
  • Remote Memory Access (MPI_Put, MPI_Get etc)
  • Parallel IO with MPI-IO
  • Techniques for overlapping communication and calculation

and we will try and cover the most popular topics.

Full details and registration

UKRI consultation on draft Research Data policy

UKRI is currently developing a new research data policy, with the aim of updating and streamlining expectations for sharing and managing research data and other research-relevant digital objects, including algorithms, software code and workflows, arising from UKRI-funded research.

This integrated policy will apply to research funded by the research councils, Research England, Innovate UK and cross-UKRI schemes. It aims to provide clearer and more consistent expectations and support best practice for different research domains and data types.

There is currently an open consultation process for comments on the draft policy. Full details of the consultation, including the draft policy document, are available at: https://engagementhub.ukri.org/ukri-openresearch/developing-ukris-research-data-policy/

We encourage ARCHER2 users to contribute their comments.

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 at:

https://dirac.ac.uk/hpc-ai-advisory-council-7th-annual-uk-conference/

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