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Free Supercomputing in Plain English Workshop, Spring 2015

Free Supercomputing in Plain English (SiPE)
Available live in person and live via videoconferencing

These workshops focus on fundamental issues of High Performance
Computing (HPC) as they relate to Computational and Data-enabled
Science & Engineering (CDS&E), including:

* overview of HPC;
* the storage hierarchy;
* instruction-level parallelism;
* high performance compilers;
* shared memory parallelism (e.g., OpenMP);
* distributed parallelism (e.g., MPI);
* HPC application types and parallel paradigms;
* multicore optimization;
* high throughput computing;
* accelerator computing (e.g., GPUs);
* scientific and I/O libraries;
* scientific visualization.

Tuesdays starting Jan 20 2015, 1:30pm Central Time
(3:30pm Atlantic, 2:30pm Eastern, 12:30pm Mountain, 11:30am Pacific)

Live in person: Stephenson Research & Technology Center boardroom,
University of Oklahoma Norman campus

Live via videoconferencing: details to be announced

Registration coming soon!

http://www.oscer.ou.edu/education/

So far, the SiPE workshops have reached over 1500 people at
248 institutions, agencies, companies and organizations in
47 US states and territories and 10 other countries:

* 178 academic institutions;
* 29 government agencies;
* 26 private companies;
* 15 not-for-profit organizations.

SiPE is targeted at an audience of not only computer scientists
but especially scientists and engineers, including a mixture of
undergraduates, graduate students, faculty and staff.

The key philosophy of the SiPE workshops is that an HPC-based code
should be maintainable, extensible and, most especially, portable
across platforms, and should be sufficiently flexible that it can
adapt to, and adopt, emerging HPC paradigms.

Prerequisite:
1 semester of programming experience and/or coursework in any of
Fortan, C, C++ or Java, recently

Major Storage Issue (why were the head nodes unavailable?)

Yesterday (10/26), early evening (4:50pm), it appears one of our primary storage units decided to have a serious crash (page fault in the kernel, if you wanted more detail), and that proceeded to offline a good share of the storage allocated to supporting our VM infrastructure. Since most of the head nodes we run are in fact VMs, this of course meant that the head nodes themselves started having problems handling new job requests and allowing logins.

Please note, any submitted jobs were not affected, only jobs that were in the process of submission around 4:50pm yesterday until 8:30am this morning.

We have restored functionality to this array and will be submitting tickets with the vendor shortly to evaluate what has occurred on the machine, and any remediations we can apply. We may need to reboot the head nodes affected by this to get them to their proper state as well, but we are evaluating where we are before making that call.

UPDATE 1:
Unfortunately, upon review, we will have to restart the head node VMs, and that process will start immediately so that folks can submit jobs as soon as possible.

UPDATE 2:
With the engagement of the vendor, we have identified the likely cause of this problem which will ultimately be addressed during our January Maintenance, due to its requirement for a reboot (which would be service interrupting right now). Thankfully, a work-around for the bug that we could apply without requiring a reboot is available and should keep the system stable until then. At this time, we have enacted that work-around.

PACE clusters ready for research

Greetings!

Our quarterly maintenance is now complete, and the clusters are running previously submitted jobs and awaiting new submissions.

In general, all tasks were successfully completed.  However, we do have some compute nodes that have not successfully applied the kernel update.  We will keep those offline for the moment and continue to work through those tomorrow.

As always, please contact us (pace-support@oit.gatech.edu) for any problems or concerns you may have. Your feedback is very important to us!

Georgia Tech’s HPCC Initiative Planning – Second Industry/Research Partnership Meeting

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For most of you receiving this email, the Technology Square Phase Two – High Performance Computer Center (HPCC) is not a new initiative. Following up on a successful first meeting this past March where Georgia Tech hosted over 100 GT faculty and industry partners, today I’m very happy to invite you to participate in the second planning meeting for the Tech Square Phase II/HPCC.  GT faculty and researchers who work in cloud computing, smart grid, building information modeling, big data and secure storage, networking (data centers as well as community networking, network virtualization, etc.) will be in attendance as well as researchers working on the model of using the data center as a key part of urban sustainability in our community (heat reuse, analytics capabilities for startup companies). Researchers and current industry partners in these areas will present their interests and capabilities in a tight 5 minute presentation format. You will have an opportunity to participate in our discussion and review the ideas which have been proposed, helping to guide us in this endeavor.

Continuing on the momentum from our first planning meeting, we are hosting this second meeting at Georgia Tech on November 11th, from 8 AM until 12 PM.  This meeting will immediately precede Georgia Tech’s People and Technology Forum, which you are invited to attend as well.

RSVP for the meeting is requested. To RSVP for this planning session click here.

If you would like to attend the IPaT Forum as well, you can register here.

As we finalize the agenda for this meeting we will follow-up with more details.  If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me or the GT Corporate relations team directly.

See you in November!
ron

Ron Hutchins, PhD
Associate Vice Provost for Research and Technology and
Chief Technology Officer
Office of the Executive Vice President for Research

A Bold New Vision For Tech Square

You may have seen or heard reference to this in other places, but I wanted to highlight some exciting things coming to Tech Square.

–Neil Bright

 

http://www.news.gatech.edu/2014/09/29/bold-new-vision-tech-square

Ron Hutchins is a man on a mission. He wants to raise the visibility of Information Technology on a university campus in ways we’ve seldom seen. Hutchins, Tech’s Associate Vice Provost for Research & Technology and Chief Technology Officer, is the visionary behind the plan to build a data center in the heart of Midtown Atlanta. He’s quick to point out though that the High Performance Computing Center is more than just a building to store equipment and disseminate data. Construction of the HPCC marks the beginning of a new phase in the expansion of Tech Square.

PACE quarterly maintenance – October ’14

Hi everybody,

Our October maintenance window is rapidly approaching.  We’ll be back to the normal two day even this time around – Tuesday, October 21 and Wednesday, October 22.

Major items this time around include the continued expansion of our DDN storage system.  This will complete the build out of the infrastructure portions of this storage system, allowing for the addition of another 600 disk drives as capacity is purchased by the faculty.

Also, we have identified a performance regression in the kernel deployed with RedHat 6.5.  With some assistance from one of our larger clusters, we have been testing an updated kernel that does not exhibit these performance problems, and will be rolling out the fix everywhere.  If you’ve noticed your codes taking longer to run since the maintenance in July, this is very likely the cause.

We will also be migrating components of our server infrastructure to RedHat 6.5.  This should not be a user visible event, but worth mentioning just in case.

Over the last few months, we’ve identified a few bad links in our network.  Fortunately, we have redundancy in place that allowed us to simply disable those links.  We will be taking corrective actions on these to bring those links back to full redundancy.

COMSOL Multiphysics Workshop in Atlanta, GA – Wednesday, 10/15

Dear Colleague,

You’re invited to a free workshop focusing on the simulation
capabilities of COMSOL Multiphysics(R). This event will take place
on Wednesday, October 15th in Atlanta, GA. All attendees will receive
a free two-week trial of the software.

During the workshop you will:
– Learn the fundamental modeling steps in COMSOL Multiphysics
– Set up and solve a simulation through a hands-on exercise
– Learn about the capabilities of COMSOL within your application area

*Please choose the session most convenient to you as both
workshops are identical.

AM Session:
9:00am – 10:30am An Overview of the Software
10:30am – 12:00pm Hands-on Tutorial

PM Session:
1:00pm – 2:30pm An Overview of the Software
2:30pm – 4:00pm Hands-on Tutorial

Event details and registration: http://comsol.com/c/1b8b

Seating is limited, so advance registration is recommended.

recent staff changes in PACE

I’m sorry to report that Dr. Wesley Emeneker has left the team for a position in industry. We are sad to see him leave, and wish him and his family the best in his future endeavors. We will be posting a Research Scientist position soon to fill this vacancy.

Ann Zhou <dzhou62@mail.gatech.edu> has joined the team as a Systems Support Engineer II. Ann joins us from Columbus State University and will be initially focused on user and hardware support, and taking over some of the system administration work that Wes had been doing.

We are concluding a search to fill the Senior System Support Engineer position vacated by Adam Munro earlier this year. An offer is pending, and I’m hopeful this person will start soon.

Finally, we have a search currently underway for an Applications Developer II. The position description is available at https://pace.gatech.edu/application-developer-ii. Please pass the word along to anybody who may have interest.

Matlab Seminars at Georgia Tech

Develop your MATLAB skills by joining a MathWorks engineer for complimentary seminars to be held on Tuesday, August 19, 2014 in the Bill Moore Student Success Center, press room A.  Register in advance at:  https://www.mathworks.com/PACEseminars

Location
Bill Moore Student Success Center, (behind Highland Bakery, next to the football stadium), second ‘R’ floor, press room A – August 19, 2014

Session 1: Optimizing and Accelerating your MATLAB Code
10:00 AM – 12:30 PM
In this session, we will demonstrate simple ways to improve and optimize your code that can boost execution speed.  We will also address common pitfalls in writing MATLAB code, explore the use of the MATLAB Profiler to find bottlenecks, and introduce programming constructs to solve computationally and data-intensive problems on multicore computers, clusters and GPUs.

  • Leveraging the power of vector and matrix operations in MATLAB
  • Identifying and addressing bottlenecks in your code
  • Utilizing additional processing power available in multicore machines, clusters, and grids

Session 2: Advanced Programming Techniques in MATLAB
1:00 PM – 3:00 PM
This master class covers two important MATLAB topics:

  • How to handle memory efficiently
  • How to choose among the rich set of function types

You will gain an understanding of how different MATLAB data types are stored in memory and how you can program in MATLAB to use memory efficiently.  We will illustrate and explore the usage and benefits of the various function types under different conditions. You will learn how using the right function type can lead to more robust and maintainable code. Demonstrations will show you how to apply these techniques to problems that arise in typical applications.