HPC Newsletter 04/15
Dear colleagues,
Welcome to the 4th HPC newsletter in 2015. The acquisition process for the bwForCluster ENM has now officially started! After having completed the required lengthy legal procedure (*pffft*), the formal call for vendor participation was published on June 8th 2015.
To prepare for the arrival of the compute cluster later this year, we would like to invite you to take a closer look at the “Call for Tiger Team Support”, issued by the bwHPC-C5 competence centers, where you can ask for our assitance to attack complex implementation or optimization issues.
With best regards,
Your HPC Team, Rechenzentrum, Universität Freiburg
Table of Contents
Upcoming Events and Important Dates
bwForCluster ENM Procurement Status
Construction Works in the Rechenzentrum
BeeGFS: High performance file system test
Upcoming Events and Important Dates
- 15.06.2015 Deadline for Tiger Team Support Call
- 16.06.2015 Bernstein Seminar: High Performance Neuro Computing
- 01.10.2015 (date to be confirmed) bwHPC-C5 Symposium in Ulm
Call for Tiger Team Support
In this call, we invite scientific user groups to apply for tiger team (high level) support by the bwHPC-C5 competence centers.
Tiger teams constitute a key instrument for specialized user support. A tiger team is part of the HPC competence center and can be established once a specific support task for implementation or optimization has been identified.
The call is open for a limited period of time (in the current round at most until June 15, 2015) and for a limited number of proposals.
More information can be found on the bwHPC-C5 website:
http://www.bwhpc-c5.de/en/tiger_teams.php
For examples of previously established tiger teams, see here:
http://www.bwhpc-c5.de/en/tiger_team_successes.php
Publications
Please inform us about any scientific publication and any published work that was achieved by using bwHPC resources (bwUniCluster, bwForCluster JUSTUS or NEMO). An informal E-Mail to publications@bwhpc-c5.de is sufficient. 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.
bwForCluster ENM Procurement Status
The legal procedure took us a bit longer than we thought, but the formal procurement process has started now with the official call for vendor participation submitted to the EU agencies and published on June 8th 2015. This means that we have about a month left for completing the specification document and the benchmark test suites. If there are any lingering contributions from your side, now would be an excellent time to wrap them up and send them to us.
Of course, we will continue talking to you, our scientific communities, throughout the whole acquisition process, but after the specification document and the benchmark suites have been communicated to the vendors, we have much less freedom for changes.
Domain Specific Consultations
On April 29th, we met with members of the Elementary Particle Physics community: Günther Quast from Karlsruhe and Markus Schumacher from Freiburg. We discussed further details of the specification parameters for the bwForCluster ENM, most notably the percentage of nodes with higher memory profile (128GB vs. 64GB). Currently, we expect 33% of the cluster nodes to be fitted with 128GB. A related topic were best practices in using Hyperthreading capabilities. We will have to conduct further field tests to come to a conclusion here. Finally, we exchanged ideas for a scientific governance of the cluster.
Teaching and Training
We would like to ask whether you have any specific needs for course or workshop topics that the bwHPC competence centers should cover in the future. If so, please let us know. For example, if there is sufficient demand, we could offer a workshop on “Speeding up Matlab”.
In addition to the workshops and courses offered by the bwHPC competence centers, there is always the option to attend one of the workshops and courses offered by HLRS in Stuttgart and other bwHPC partners. For the complete course program, please see the bwHPC events website:
http://www.bwhpc-c5.de/schulungsangebot.php
Last but not least, our colleagues from France are planning a 5-day GPGPU workshop together with Nvidia. If you are interested, please contact us, so we can provide you with the details once the workshop is confirmed.
Construction Works in the Rechenzentrum
Constructions works in the Rechenzentrum are continuing as planned. In machine hall IIb, the ceiling rails for power supply and network connection have been installed. The floor carpet was removed and has been replaced by shiny gray anti-static coating. There are already two thick copper cables coming from the main power supply room, and another pair of thick copper cables is going to be added soon. Next step will be the installation of the rack pedestals and preparations for installing the water cooling infrastructure.
HPC Conference in Strasbourg
On 11th and 12th of May, we were invited by Romaric David, CTO of the computing center of the university of Strasbourg (France), to present our HPC competence center and the bwHPC initiative at the “HPC Days 2015” conference. We took the opportunity to give a presentation of our virtualization efforts (Bernd Wiebelt: HPC and Virtualization – A Happy Marriage”) and the federative structure of the bwHPC initiative (Dirk von Suchodoletz: “A federative approach to HPC”).
https://services-numeriques.unistra.fr/hpc/animation-scientifique.html
We also discussed further opportunities for collaboration. As a result, we will have a contribution Romaric David for the upcoming bwHPC-C5 symoposium on October 1st in Ulm (date to be confirmed). Furthermore, as already stated, there will be a joint workshop on GPGPU programming in Strasbourg, date to be yet determined.
bwServices (new installation)
Our bwIDM server crashed and in order to restore access to NEMO, we had to do a complete new and clean installation of the bwIDM service. The old installation was suffering from a hidden database corruption. Leading up to the crash, things were running fine and looking good on the outside. However, the database representation written to disk had become corrupted for a while, so backups were corrupted as well.
We have learned our lesson and taken measures to prevent this fatal misbehavior in the future. However, the user password database was unrecoverable. We would therefore kindly ask you to set a new password for the NEMO cluster here:
https://bwservices.uni-freiburg.de/service/set-password.xhtml
BeeGFS: High performance file system test
We are currently looking into providing a high performance file system for our NEMO test cluster. To this end, we are reconfiguring the old bwGRiD Lustre-Hardware. BeeGFS is the candidate of choice, since there are no license fees to pay and it is one possible candidate for the high performance file system to be used later in the bwForCluster ENM.
HPC Team, Rechenzentrum, Universität Freiburg
http://www.hpc.uni-freiburg.de
bwHPC-C5 Project
http://www.bwhpc-c5.de
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