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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 are still having various issues.  We will continue to work through those tomorrow.

 

2014-07-15 at 6am: Maintenance has begun

Hi folks,

It is time again for our quarterly maintenance. We have a bit of a situation this time around and will need to extend our activities into a third day – starting at 6:00am Tuesday, July 15 and ending at or before 11:59pm Thursday, July 17. This is a one-time event, and I do not expect to move to three-day maintenance as a norm. Continue reading below for more details.

Over the years, we’ve grown quite a bit and filled up one side of our big Infiniband switch. This is a good thing! The good news is that there is plenty of expansion room on the other side of the switch. The bad news is that we didn’t leave a hole in the raised floor to get the cables to the other side of the switch. In order to rectify this, and install all of the equipment that was ordered in June, we need to move the rack that contains the switch as well as some HVAC units on either side. In order to do this, we need to unplug a couple hundred Infiniband connections and some ethernet fiber. Facilities will be on hand to handle the HVAC. After all the racks are moved, we’ll swap in some new raised-floor tiles and put everything back together. This is a fair bit of work, and is the impetus for the extra day.

In addition, we will be upgrading all of the RedHat 6 compute nodes and login nodes from RHEL6.3 to RHEL6.5 – this represents nearly all of the clusters that PACE manages. This image has been running on the TestFlight cluster for some time now – if you haven’t taken the opportunity to test your codes there, please do so. This important update contains some critical security fixes to go along with the usual assortment of bug fixes.

We are also deploying updates to the scheduler prologue and epilogue scripts to more effectively combat “leftover” processes from jobs that don’t completely clean up after themselves. This should help reduce situations where jobs aren’t started because compute nodes incorrectly appear busy to the scheduler.

We will also be relocating some storage servers to prepare for incoming equipment. There should be no noticeable impact to this move, but just in case, the following filesystems are involved:

• /nv/pase1
• /nv/pb2
• /nv/pc6
• /nv/pcoc1
• /nv/pface1
• /nv/pmart1
• /nv/pmeg1
• /nv/pmicro1
• /nv/py2

Among other things, these moves will pave the way for another capacity expansion of our DDN project storage, as well as a new scratch filesystem. Stay tuned for more details on the new scratch, but we are planning a significant capacity and performance increase. Projected timeframe is to go into limited production during our October maintenance window, and ramp up from there.

We will also be implementing some performance tuning changes for the ethernet networks that should primarily benefit the non-GPFS project storage.

The /nv/pase1 filesystem will be moved back to its old storage server, which is now repaired and tested.

The tardis-6 head node will have some additional memory allocated.

And finally, some other minor changes – Firmware updates to our DDN/GPFS storage, as recommended by DDN, as well as installation of additional disks for increased capacity.

The OIT Network Backbone team will be upgrading the appliances that provide DNS & DHCP services for PACE. This should be negligible impact to us, as they have already rolled out new appliances for most of campus already.

Replacement of a fuse for the in-rack power distribution in rack H33.

— Neil Bright

A unique opportunity to meet in an intimate setting with the grid generation, solver, and post-processing tool developers prominent in the field! Past attendees include developers of FUN3D, OpenFoam, Overflow, Overgrid, Overture, SUGGAR++, and technical rep- resentatives from Pointwise, Intelligent Light, Celeritas, and more!

For more information, visit: http://www.2014.oversetgridsymposium.org/index.php

XSEDE 2014 is coming to town, and here’s their announcement (https://www.xsede.org/web/conference/xsede14)

Mark your calendars and join us in Atlanta for XSEDE14, July 13-18, 2014!

The annual XSEDE conference brings together the extended community of individuals interested in advancing research cyberinfrastructure and integrated digital services for the benefit of science and society. XSEDE14 will place a special emphasis on recruiting and engaging under-represented minorities, women, and students as well as encouraging participation by people from domains of study that do not traditionally use high-performance computing. Sessions will be structured to engage people who are new to computational science and engineering, as well as providing in-depth tutorials and high-quality peer-reviewed papers that will allow the most experienced researchers to gain new insights and knowledge.

Hotel and Registration deadlines extended!

The XSEDE14 Conference is shaping up to be an excellent conference! We are pleased to announce that the hotel has extended our room block rate until June 27. To align with the extended room block extension, the conference registration will remain at $500 for full conference participation through June 27. After June 27, the late registration fee of $600 will begin.