Newsletter from Abacus 2.0, August 2016

In this newsletter:

• Call for Access to Abacus 2.0 for the period July-October 2016 is still open with lower rates
• Call of interest for National eScience Pilot Projects is still open
• Abacus in new clothes at National Supercomputing Day on May 30 at SDU
• New supercomputing videos
• DeIC Conference 2016, Kolding, 4-5 October, 2016
• Second National Supercomputing Day, DTU, 7 November 2016
• EuroMPI 2016, Edinburgh, 25-28 September 2016

Call for Access

You can still send in requests for access to Abacus 2.0 for our four-month window fromJuly-October 2016.

Rearchers from all universities in Denmark can request access to HPC processing power on Abacus 2.0 for research projects with a strong emphasis on high-performance large-scale computing. Access to the facility is not free.

Per July 1, 2016 these are the rates per node per hour in DKK excluding VAT for researchers.

• Slim: 1,90 DKK / node hour  (~ 0,08 DKK / CPU core hour)
• Fat: 2,30 DKK / node hour  (~0,10 DKK / CPU core hour)
• GPU: 2,65 DKK / node hour  (~0,11 DKK  / CPU core hour)

All our nodes have 24 CPU cores, i.e., if you want the rate per CPU core, you should divide all prices by 24.

Access to Abacus 2.0 will be given to individual researchers or research groups via a Principal Investigator (PI).

Proposers for any kind of allocation schemes must hold at least the position of postdoc within their institution. PhD students cannot apply on their own, but must instead do so in consultation with, and under the auspices of, their supervisor.

Request access here.

Abacus 2.0 is also available to users from business and industry. There are variety of methods for commercial organisations to gain access to the HPC facility. Whether as part of a research collaboration or working within a larger established consortia or even asking for assistance on a consultancy basis. If you wish to make use of Abacus 2.0 then please send an email to contact@deic.sdu.dk and we can then direct your interest appropriately.

Call of interest for National eScience Pilot Projects

Researchers at Danish universities may submit a call of interest for a project to become a DeIC National eScience Pilot Project at DeIC National HPC Centre, SDU.

A national eScience pilot project is granted up to eight hours of technical support and 1.000 compute node hours.

For applications please see the website: https://deic.sdu.dk/get-access/deic-pilot

Abacus in new clothes

The first National Supercomputing Day on May 30 at SDU was also the inauguration of the upgraded Abacus 2.0. Abacus 2.0 moved to a new and better location in SDU´s basement and has at the same time been extended with 192 slim nodes. Abacus 2.0 now has a total of 584 nodes. Read more about the day here. You can find the speeches and presentations held that day in the program here.

Videos

Recently released: video about the advantages of using Abacus 2.0 as well as a video about the three national supercomputers in Denmark.

The Danish e-Infrastructure Cooperation hosts a conference for all interested in e-infrastructure for research and education

Date: October 4-5, 2016

Venue: Hotel Comwell Kolding

Sign up here and read the conference programme

Second National Supercomputing Day – Scientific applications of High Performance Computing

Supercomputing enables researchers to obtain a great amount of results coming from various fields. Currently, supercomputers are being used for a wide range of applications, such as data visualization, modelling and simulations within advanced chemistry, material science, biophysics, high-energy physics, system biology, bioinformatics, and engineering science to data medicine.

In order to provide researchers an exhaustive insight into the potential of supercomputing the DeIC eScience Center in cooperation with coordinators from the Danish national supercomputer systems: DeIC National HPC Centre, SDU (Abacus 2.0), DeIC Life Science Supercomputer, DTU (Computerome), and DeIC National Cultural Heritage Cluster, State and University Library are pleased to invite you to a theme day with a focus on “research and researchers” on November 7, 2016.

The event targets researchers from various scientific fields. It addresses both new and curious researchers as potential users as well as already existing users of supercomputers. Everyone is welcome to participate – including University staff members who help researchers with supercomputing both locally and nationally. The day will consist of presentations, that will show the application of supercomputing from different perspectives including that of super-users as well as researchers who only recently put “high voltage” through their research data. The programme includes also other aspects and challenges in the use of supercomputing for research.

When: Monday, November 7, 2016 at 9 AM – 4 PM
Where: DTU, Lyngby – Main building 101, meeting room 1

EuroMPI 2016: Modern Challenges to MPI’s Dominance in HPC

Organised by EPCC at The University of Edinburgh

In cooperation with ACM SIGHPC

Edinburgh, 25-28 September 2016

http://www.eurompi2016.ed.ac.uk

Early bird deadline 19th August 2016

EuroMPI is the world’s only conference dedicated to the Message-Passing Interface (MPI). Now in its 23rd year, EuroMPI is the leading conference for

users and developers of MPI. Join us in the beautiful city of Edinburgh for 4 days of networking, discussion and skills building. The theme of this

year’s conference is “Modern Challenges to MPI’s Dominance in HPC”.

Technical papers discussion will include:

• Useful optimisations of existing MPI functions,
• Interesting directions for future MPI functionality,
• Practical experiences with fault-tolerant MPI programs,
• Exciting progress toward million-thread MPI capability.

EuroMPI Keynotes

• Jonathan Dursi, Ontario Institute for Cancer Research: “How Can MPI Fit Into Today’s Big Computing?”

For years, the academic science and engineering community was almost alone in pursuing very large-scale numerical computing, and MPI was the lingua franca for such work. In this talk, Jonathan looks to see where MPI and the MPI community fits in to this new ecosystem.

• Bill Gropp, NCSA, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: “MPI: The Once and Future King”

Will MPI continue to be relevant, or will some new programming system replace it? Bill’s talk will review the reasons for MPI’s success, including the addition of new features in MPI-2, MPI-3, and planned for MPI-4, and argues why MPI will continue to be the parallel programming system for highly scalable applications.

• Kathryn Mohror, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory: “Getting Insider Information via the New MPI Tools Information Interface”

MPI 3.0 introduced a new interface for MPI support tools called the MPI Tools Information Interface. With this interface, for the first time, tools can access MPI internal performance and configuration information.

• David Lecomber, Allinea Software: “HPC’s a-changing, so what happens to everything we know?”

The world of HPC is changing faster than it has changed for a long time. HPC has a wider reach than ever. With so much in flux – what does that mean and what can be done for HPC insiders to thrive in the new world?

Workshops and Tutorials at EuroMPI: Register Now

EuroMPI has a commitment to a strong programme of tutorials, with this year’s tutorials on Sunday 25th September including:

• Machine Learning at Scale – Tom Ashby, IMEC, Belgium, & Tom Vander Aa, Exascience Lab at IMEC, Belgium.

This tutorial aims to give the HPC audience insight into the needs and opportunities for using HPC tools for machine learning on large data sets.

• Survival in an MPI World – George Bosilca, Innovative Computing Laboratory, University of Tennessee.

In this tutorial, we will present a holistic approach to fault tolerance by introducing multiple fault management techniques, while maintaining the focus on User Level Failure Mitigation (ULFM), a minimal extension of the MPI specification to introduce resilience in applications.

Full details of the tutorials are available at:

• http://www.eurompi2016.ed.ac.uk/tutorials

Careers in HPC: An Evening With Interesting People Organised by Women in HPC, but open to all

Sunday, 25 September 2016 from 15:30 to 21:30

Held in collaboration with EuroMPI 2016 and hosted by WHPC, we invite you to join us to learn about creating impact from your work and how to develop your career in scientific software engineering. Finish the evening by meeting leading experts from the MPI community from around the world over dinner.

This session will be followed a special networking evening designed to provide you with key skills to develop your career and meet experts from the HPC and MPI community. This event, hosted by Women in HPC, but open to everyone will host a panel discussion on creating impact from your work: insight into the UK academic funding landscape, as well as a discussion on the opportunities available for careers for Research Software Engineers. The evening will finish with a dinner where you can meet leading members of the MPI and HPC community from around the world.

Call for Posters:

There is still an opportunity to submit abstracts to present your work as a poster at EuroMPI. As part of the EuroMPI 2016 conference, we invite submissions for non-peer-reviewed posters. These posters will not be published in the proceedings of the conference, but presenters will be invited to give a lightning talk about their work at the conference and the poster will be displayed during the poster reception.

http://www.eurompi2016.ed.ac.uk/registration

For further information please contact: eurompi-info@ed.ac.uk