HPC Newsletter 05/15
Dear colleagues,
Welcome to our 5th newsletter in 2015. The procurement procedure for the bwForCluster ENM is well progressing and the construction work for the new server facility is nearing completion. Meanwhile, the preliminary operational concept is producing first results: A scientifc paper acknowledging NEMO has been published and will be presented on the 2nd bwHPC Symposium on October 2nd in Ulm. You are cordially invited to join this conference, as it is an excellent chance to meet fellow scientists and gather fresh HPC ideas.
Last but not least, you are cordially invited to the Colloquium on the 60th birthday of Prof. Dr. Gerhard Schneider on September 16th in Freiburg.
With best regards,
Your HPC Team, Rechenzentrum, Universität Freiburg
Table of Contents
Upcoming Events and Important Dates1
Conference: 2nd bwHPC Symposium on October 2nd in Ulm3
bwUniCluster at your finger tips5
Domain Specific Consultations6
Constructions works in the Rechenzentrum10
Beyond 10GBE BelWue interconnect11
Upcoming Events and Important Dates
- 07-11.09.2015 Karlsruhe, GridKa School 201512
- 16.09.2015 Festkolloquium zum 60. Geburtstag von Prof. Dr. Gerhard Schneider13
- 02.10.2015 Ulm, 2nd bwHPC Symposium in Ulm, REGISTER HERE14.
- 06-07.10.2015 (tba) Karlsruhe, Introduction to HPC (Course)
- 07.10.2015 (tba) Ulm, MATLAB workshop with Loren Shure from Mathworks
- 20.10.2015 (tbc) Freiburg, Introduction to HPC (Course)
For a list of upcoming courses, please see http://www.bwhpc-c5.de/en/course_opportunities.php15
Procurement status
We are very pleased to announce that the first stage of the procurement procedure for the bwForCluster ENM has been completed: A short list of pre-qualified vendors has been created. Those vendors have by now received our formal invitation to tender along with a preliminary technical specification of the system to be delivered. We are looking forward to the second procurement stage, where we will receive offers from the selected vendors and start negotiations.
Conference: 2nd bwHPC Symposium on October 2nd in Ulm
On behalf of the bwHPC-C5 project16 we would like to invite you to participate in the upcoming 2nd bwHPC symposium on October 02, 2015 hosted at the Ulm University (site of the bwForCluster JUSTUS).
The symposium focuses on presenting and discussing your scientific computing projects and results as well as the progress and achievements of the bwHPC initiative and the bwHPC-C5 project. The symposium will be the ideal platform for the dialogue between you, the bwHPC operators and the bwHPC-C5 support teams. For the agenda and registration please visit the following website:
https://www.bwhpc-c5.de/2-bwhpc-symposium.php17
First NEMO publication
We were quite surprised ourselves how fast our preliminary bwForCluster ENM (Codename "NEMO") showed a decent ability to cope with production level tasks. Running on the old bwGRiD hardware, it can offer only a fraction of the compute power available on the bwUniCluster or the bwForCluster JUSTUS. However, even legacy hardware running in a modern software environment can be of assistance in achieving scientific results. Therefore, we were very pleased to learn about a publication18 by Sarah Müller, Ulrich Nierste and Stefan Schacht from Karlsruhe on "Topological amplitudes in D decays to two pseudoscalars: A global analysis with linear SU(3)F breaking". Dr. Schacht has kindly agreed to present this work at the aformentioned 2nd bwHPC Symposium in Ulm.
bwUniCluster at your finger tips
In the light of recent events, we would like to remind you that the University of Freiburg holds a 10% share on the bwUniCluster hosted by the KIT in Karlsruhe. This high performance computing resource is available to all students, scientists and employees of the University of Freiburg without any formal project proposal.
Currently, we are slightly below our 10% usage quota, so jobs submitted by users from Freiburg should get no additional fair-share penalty and begin executing once the resources become available. Due to its universal nature, the bwUniCluster is quite crowded. Jobs are allowed to run for several days, so please do not expect large jobs (8 nodes or more) to begin executing right after submission.
If you experience problems or you have the feeling that your jobs are waiting for too long in the queue, please let us know. We appreciate your feedback! Please send an E-Mail to enm-support@hpc.uni-freiburg.de19, and we will get back to you.
For the bwUniCluster usage statistics of the past 12 months, please take a look at our website20.
Domain Specific Consultations
On August 17th, we met with members of the Elementary Particle Physics community from Karlsruhe. They are the beta testers for the virtualization framework that has been installed on NEMO, the preliminary bwForCluster ENM. Together, we have been researching mechanisms to dynamically allocate computational resources for running HPC tasks in a complex, project related software environment provided by virtual machines. The main challenges here are proper accounting for the resources used (including e.g. fair-share acknowledgement) and the interoperability of two different job scheduling mechanisms.
bwForCluster MLS&WISO
Our sibling bwForCluster MLS&WISO, located in Mannheim and Heidelberg, is almost about to go live. It is dedicated to research in Molecular Life Science, Economics, and Social Sciences as well as scientific computing in methods development. The cluster's production part was built by MEGWARE and its development part by DALCO. Both parts made it into the current TOP500 list of supercomputers,see http://www.top500.org/site/5056421.
For further details, please consult the bwHPC best practices WIKI guide22.
In particular, follow this link to find more information on the hardware architecture23.
Workshop on governance issues held in Mannheim
The HPC group in Freiburg is driving the development of governance structures for the cluster sites. We hope to design proper governance bodies to establish concepts and problem-solving structures for efficient steering and to balance the interests of users, providers and funders as well as share- and stakeholders in each cluster. On July 13th, 2015 we held a first workshop on governance in cooperations. The next event will be held at a workshop at the upcoming ZKI conference in Freiburg. We are using your feedback to extend and refine our suggestions and hope to present a new iteration soon.
Renewed Membership in NGI-DE
Following the tradition established by the Black Forest Grid Initiative, Freiburg has renewed its membership in the National Grid Initiative for Germany. The goal of NGI-DE is to provide a reliable and secure e-infrastructure for Germany. Furthermore, the NGI-DE takes part in the European Grid Initiative (EGI).
For more information, please see https://www.ngi-de.eu/english/index.php24
Construction Work in the Rechenzentrum
Despite holiday season, there has been a lot of progress lately with respect to construction work and buildup of technical infrastructure. The lighting for the new server facility was installed and the floor did get a new antistatic cover layer. The metal frames to base the computers racks upon have been installed, as well the core infrastructure for the water cooling and electric power supply. In the beginning of August, the ten water cooled racks that will host the compute cluster were delivered and they have been mounted on top of the metal frames.
Beyond 10GbE BelWue interconnect
The Computing Center is currently evaluating new router hardware to upgrade uplink to the statewide BelWue network from the current 10 Gigabit/second to 40 Gb/s or even at a later stage to 100 Gb/s. This would allow for two kind of speedups: On the one hand, multiple 10 Gb/s connections from other HPC sites can be served simulatenaously at full speed. On the other hand, connections to other HPC sites already connected to BelWue with 40 Gb/s or more can exploit the full bandwidth. This will speed up necessary data transfers between HPC sites like required for the particle physics applications.
HPC Team, Rechenzentrum, Universität Freiburg
http://www.hpc.uni-freiburg.de25
bwHPC-C5 Project
http://www.bwhpc-c5.de26
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