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HPC Newsletter 02/16

HPC Newsletter 02/16

Dear colleagues,

On Monday, May 30th another milestone for the forthcoming bwForCluster NEMO was reached: The new hardware arrived at the Rechenzentrum in Freiburg. Installation and cabling was finished by Wednesday, June 2nd. At the moment, the vendor is running compliance tests and benchmarks. Our sibling bwForCluster in Tübingen is only shortly behind. So far there have been no show stoppers, so we are optimistic that the two final bwForClusters will be available for production in a few weeks from now.

We would like to invite you to the official inauguration of the new bwForClusters. The event will take place on July 14th in Freiburg.

Your HPC Team, Rechenzentrum, Universität Freiburg

Table of Contents

Upcoming events and important dates

bwForCluster NEMO delivery and installation

bwForCluster Inauguration on July 14th

bwForCluster NEMO ramp up phase

Preparation of "Rechenvorhaben" (planned computing activities)

Testcluster NEMO: End of Life set to 01.08.2016

International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) in Frankfurt

HPC Eucor talk for school students in Strasbourg

Upcoming events and important dates

14-16.06.2016: NVidia Hackathon in Strasbourg

19-23.05.2015: International Supercomputing Conference (Frankfurt)

14.07.2016 Inauguration of bwForCluster NEMO and bwForCluster BinAC

01.08.2016: Testcluster End of Life

For a list of upcoming course opportunities, please see http://www.bwhpc-c5.de/en/course_opportunities.php

bwForCluster NEMO delivery and installation

The new bwForCluster NEMO arrived on Monday, May 30th at the Rechenzentrum's doorsteps. Unloading went smoothly and was completed in less than an hour. The rest of the day was spent unboxing and installing the nodes into the racks. It took another two days to install the cables and deploy the software stack which is currently used to run the compliance tests and benchmarks. So far, all this work has been done by the vendor with the HPC team supervising and lending a helping hand where necessary. The actual handover will happen in the coming days.

bwForCluster Inauguration on July 14th

With the bwForCluster BinAC (in Tübingen) and bwForCluster NEMO (in Freiburg) about to become operational, the bwHPC initiative has reached another milestone. All four bwForClusters and the bwUniCluster will be available for researchers from Baden-Württemberg and the innovation circle is thus completed. To celebrate this, the official inauguration of both bwForClusters will take place in Freiburg on July 14th. You are cordially invited to join the event. An official agenda is in preparation and will be published soon.

Back-to-back with the bwForCluster inauguration event, the first user assembly for the bwForCluster NEMO will be held. The HPC team will present the technical specifications and the initial model of operation. There will be enough room left for answering questions and discussions.

bwForCluster NEMO ramp up phase

We have been testing the operating model for the bwForCluster NEMO on the test cluster for more than a year now. Therefore, we are confident that the new hardware can be turned into a production-ready supercomputer very quickly. The mandatory benchmarks and compliance tests have to be completed before the hardware is handed over to us. After that, we can start the provisioning of the system according to our needs. Finally, we will go through brief Alpha and Beta testing stages before declaring the bwForCluster NEMO production-ready.

  • First half of July: Alpha-Test with selected users
  • Second half of July: Beta-Test with all users
  • First half of August: Reset of fairshare values, start of production

Preparation of "Rechenvorhaben" (planned computing activities)

For the old NEMO test cluster, only an entitlement was needed, which was granted to all members of universities in Baden-Württemberg. The same entitlement is also valid for the new bwForCluster NEMO. If you have not done already, we recommend you take the opportunity to get it. The procedure takes only a few minutes of your time.

bwForCluster Entitlement

Additionally, for using the new bwForCluster NEMO, you need to be associated with a "Rechenvorhaben" (planned compute activities). This has to be applied for through the bwHPC-C5 web site to allow proper routing of requests to the respective HPC resources and HPC competence centers. We would ask that only scientific supervisors fill out the form and not the individual researchers in a workgroup. Once approved, the supervisors can associate accounts to their "Rechenvorhaben" as they see fit. Please note that to be eligible for the bwForCluster NEMO, you have to do research in the scientific fields covered (i.e. Neuroscience, Elementary Particle Physics, Microsystems Engineering) or belong to the group of shareholders.

bwForCluster Access

Testcluster NEMO: End of Life set to 01.08.2016

With the arrival of the new hardware, we will keep the old test cluster working only for a short transition period. Any computations on the test cluster need to be completed by August 1st, 2016. This is the date when we will turn off the old compute nodes and the job scheduler.

The Login-Server and your files will be accessible until 01.09.2016.

International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) in Frankfurt

The bwHPC initiative is present with a booth at the ISC in Frankfurt. This is a joint effort of all participating project partners. If you want to meet representatives of the Freiburg HPC team, we will be present at the booth on Tuesday 21.06. from 14:00 to 18:00 (guaranteed) and possibly at other times throughout the conference. Of course, you can also fix an appointment with us beforehand. We will use the conference for gathering information on future hardware developments, in particular with respect to the storage of research data (LSDF-2 grant application) and MIC architectures (future NEMO extensions).

On the bwHPC booth, we will be running a screen presentation with bwHPC topics. If you want to contribute with a slide or a movie from your workgroup or scientific field, you are warmly welcome. Please send us the material via E-Mail or Download-Link and we will see to integrate it into the bwHPC presentation.

HPC Eucor talk for school students in Strasbourg

On 29.04.2016, the HPC center of Strasbourg university organized an afternoon seminar together with Freiburg's HPC team. This targeted students of Lycée Polyvalent Marguerite Yourcenar in Erstein. Talks on Physics, Geology, Neuroscience and Biology were to give an insight into potential future fields for study and work. Bernd Wiebelt from HPC competence center in Freiburg gave a talk on the importance of supercomputing for future research projects.

Publications

Please inform us about any scientific publication and any published work that was achieved by using bwHPC resources (bwUniCluster, bwForCluster JUSTUS, bwForCluster MLS&WISO or pre-bwForCluster NEMO). An informal E-Mail to publications@bwhpc-c5.de is all it takes. Thank you!

Your publication will be referenced on the bwHPC-C5 website:

http://www.bwhpc-c5.de/en/user_publications.php

We would like to stress that it is in our mutual interest to promote all accomplishments which have been made using bwHPC resources. We are required to report to the funding agencies during and at the end of the funding period. For these reports, scientific publications are the most important success indicators. Further funding will therefore strongly depend on both quantity and quality of said publications.


HPC Team, Rechenzentrum, Universität Freiburg
http://www.hpc.uni-freiburg.de

bwHPC-C5 Project
http://www.bwhpc-c5.de

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