Login to EPCC SAFE SAFE 

ARCHER2 Weekly Newsletter

By ARCHER2 Service on March 25, 2026

Tags: newsletters 

ARCHER2 Outreach and Public Engagement

Free webinar, Wednesday 25th March 2026 15:00 - 16:00

Outreach enables the sustainable growth of any community: it showcases the value of the work, explains why it matters, and attracts diverse new talent. This is particularly important in high performance computing (HPC), a field that most people don’t encounter directly in their everyday lives.

The ARCHER2 Outreach team delivers both our own outreach and works to strengthen and connect the outreach community itself, sharing our expertise to support the people who make HPC engagement happen.

By bringing practitioners together at conferences and events, we help develop a more collective, sustainable ecosystem for outreach delivery, widening participation and sharing good practice across the community.

Alongside this, we also engage directly with a wonderfully wide range of audiences, from pre-school children to students, researchers, and the general public, through interactive and hands-on activities at science fairs, in classrooms, and in training environments. All of which are designed to teach the fundamentals of what we do: supercomputing!

This interactive webinar will showcase the breadth of ARCHER2 outreach activities, demonstrating how HPC can be made accessible, engaging, and fun. Join us to explore our VR headset, learn about spintronics, and, of course, experience the all-time favourite: parallel sock sorting!

Full details and join link

Intermediate Research Software Development

University of Manchester, 13 April 2026 13.30-17.00, 14 - 16 April 2026 09:30 - 17:00 (Rescheduled)

This course aims to teach a core set of established, intermediate-level software development skills and best practices for working as part of a team in a research environment using Python as an example programming language (see detailed Learning objectives below). The core set of skills we teach is not a comprehensive set of all-encompassing skills, but a selective set of tried-and-tested collaborative development skills that forms a firm foundation for continuing on your learning journey.

A typical learner for this course may be someone who is working in a research environment, needing to write some code, has gained basic software development skills either by self-learning or attending, e.g., a novice Software Carpentry Python course. They have been applying those skills in their domain of work by writing code for some time, e.g. half a year or more. However, their software development-related projects are now becoming larger and are involving more researchers and other stakeholders (e.g. users), for example:

Software is becoming more complex and more collaborative development effort is needed to keep the software running Software is going further than just the small group developing and/or using the code there are more users and an increasing need to add new features ‘Technical debt’ is increasing with demands to add new functionality while ensuring previous development efforts remain functional and maintainable

They now need intermediate software engineering skills to help them design more robust software code that goes beyond a few thrown-together proof-of-concept scripts, taking into consideration the lifecycle of software, writing software for stakeholders, team ethic and applying a process to understanding, designing, building, releasing, and maintaining software.

Full details and registration

Profiling and Optimisation Workshop

Online 14th - 15th April 2026 09:00 - 17:00

This 2-day advanced level on-line course will give attendees the skills needed to understand the system architecture of platforms such as ARCHER2 and the new Cirrus system, the programming environment and furthermore explains how application performance can be explored by means of profiling tools and which optimisation strategies are available. The course comprises lectures, examples and follow-along demos. It covers both CPU and GPU usage.

Full details and registration

Modern C++ for Computational Scientists

Online 15 - 17 April 2026 09:30 - 16:30

With the recent revisions to the C++ language and standard library, the ways it is now being used are quite different. Used well, these features enable the programmer to write elegant, reusable and portable code that runs efficiently on a variety of architectures.

However it is still a very large and complex tool. This course will cover a minimal set of features to allow an experienced non-C++ programmer to get to grips with language.

These include:

  • overloading
  • templates
  • containers
  • iterators
  • lambdas
  • standard algorithms

We will also briefly cover some important libraries for numerical computing.

Full details and registration

Message Passing programming with MPI

Imperial College London, Wednesday 22nd - Thursday 23rd Apil 10:00 - 17:00 (In Person); Friday 1st May 10:00 - 12:30 (online)

The world’s largest supercomputers are used almost exclusively to run applications which are parallelised using Message Passing. The course covers all the basic knowledge required to write parallel programs using this programming model, and is directly applicable to almost every parallel computer architecture.

Parallel programming by definition involves co-operation between processors to solve a common task. The programmer has to define the tasks that will be executed by the processors, and also how these tasks are to synchronise and exchange data with one another. In the message-passing model the tasks are separate processes that communicate and synchronise by explicitly sending each other messages. All these parallel operations are performed via calls to some message-passing interface that is entirely responsible for interfacing with the physical communication network linking the actual processors together. This course uses the de facto standard for message passing, the Message Passing Interface (MPI). It covers point-to-point communication, non-blocking operations, derived datatypes, virtual topologies, collective communication and general design issues.

Full details and registration

Workflows

Online, 27 - 28 April 2026 10:00 - 12:00

his short seminar provides an introduction to modern scientific workflows and hands-on practice with two workflow systems. Over two half-days (4 hours each), attendees will:

Day 1

Understand the role and purpose of scientific workflows, including how and why they are used to structure and automate complex data-processing pipelines. Modules include an introduction to workflow concepts and an extended practical session creating workflows with Common Workflow Language (CWL), including exercises in a Google Colab Jupyter Notebooks to install and run CWL workflows.

Day 2

Explore dispel4py, a Python-based streaming workflow framework. Participants will work through basic and advanced concepts, build simple examples, and complete hands-on exercises using dispel4py in Google Colab Jupyter Notebooks, including some real-use cases drawn from scientific applications.

Prerequisites

Attendees should be comfortable with basic Python programming concepts and familiar with using Jupyter notebooks or Google Colab; no prior experience in workflow languages is required.

Learning objectives

By the end of the course attendees will be able to describe workflow concepts and systems, write and run basic CWL workflows in a notebook environment, and develop and test simple dispel4py workflows for streaming data processing.

Full details and registration

CASTEP 26.1.1 available on ARCHER2

The latest release of CASTEP (version 26.1.1) is now available for use on ARCHER2. Users with access to CASTEP on ARCHER2 can access this release by using the command:

module load castep/26.11

in their job submission scripts. CASTEP 25.1.1 remains the default version on ARCHER2 (i.e. the version you get with “module load castep”). Information on using CASTEP on ARCHER2 can be found in the docs

If you have any questions or run into any issues with using CASTEP on ARCHER2, please get in touch with the ARCHER2 Service Desk:

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.

Twitter

Recordings of past courses

Recordings of past virtual tutorials