On the 26th and 31st of January, the annual eScience Center User Forum took place. Here, we received useful feedback on our services and the SDU users had a chance to ask the user support team/SDU Front Office any questions they might have.
On the 26th of January, the theme of the user forum was “Interactive HPC”. Team leader for user support, Emiliano Molinaro, began the session by welcoming the participant and giving a summary of some of the changes that happened on the UCloud platform in 2022.
After the introduction, Assistant Professor, Abdolrahman Peimankar, from the Maersk Mc-Kinney Moller Institute at TEK presented his experience with using UCloud for teaching to kick off the discussion.
In his classes, Abdolrahman Peimankar has been using the program nbgrader, which is a tool that facilitates creating and grading assignments in Jupyter Notebook. The workflow for creating assignments and grading students was manual and required a heavy administrative workload. Abdolrahman Peimankar therefore contacted the SDU eScience Center and asked if npbgrader could become an app on UCloud. The user support team made sure it did, and this was great help to Abdolrahman Peimankar, who now saves several hours on grading assignments via npbgrader.
“The nice thing is if you have multiple instructors and multiple courses, then they can log in easily through UCloud and grade the assignment. That means a lot – I tried to do it myself, and it was quite a headache to get it to run.”
On the 31st of January, the theme of the user forum was “Traditional HPC”. Martin Lundquist Hansen, team leader for the infrastructure team at the SDU eScience Center, presented the DeiC Large Memory HPC system, which has recently been integrated with UCloud as part of the launch of the DeiC Integration Portal.
Feedback received
For the “Interactive HPC” session of the user forum, we received several questions from our users and suggestions for improvements in the future. Some of the suggestions are already on the roadmap – e.g. to add a feature where the user can make UCloud regard a file as a text file no matter what the extension is – and others will be looked further into.
Remember that you can alway suggest new features to our services by contacting support@escience.sdu.dk or creating a ticket via our service desk. If you are not employed at SDU and would like to suggest new features to either DeiC Interactive HPC or DeiC Large Memory HPC, please contact your local Front Office.
