Attending organisations

• EPCC, The University of Edinburgh (ARCHER, Cirrus)
• University of Bath (GW4 Isambard)
• University of Birmingham, University of Aston (HPC-Mid+)
• University of Cambridge
• University of Manchester
• University of Nottingham
• Trinity College Dublin

Actions

• (Andy Turner, EPCC) Put out vote for updated time for the meeting
  • Done. 2pm Tuesdays confirmed as least-worst time

National HPC RSE Updates

ARCHER, Cirrus, EPCC

• MPI benchmarks across a wide variety of systems and MPI libraries now available at: https://github.com/hpc-uk/archer-benchmarks/tree/master/synth/IMB
• Most complete performance analysis so far is for Alltoallv (as it is important for CASTEP and we were looking at the performance of this specifically), see: https://github.com/hpc-uk/archer-benchmarks/blob/master/synth/IMB/analysis/IMB_Alltoallv_compare.ipynb
  • Issues with collectives on Arm systems that are not understood yet
• Managed to get multi-node MPI Singularity container jobs running on Cirrus. Performance is close to native (non-container) runs
  • Plan to publish technical report or blog article on this
• Moving ReFrame system regression testing framework into production on Cirrus
  • ReFrame: https://reframe-hpc.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
  • Cirrus configuration and initial tests: https://github.com/EPCCed/epcc-reframe

Isambard, GW4

• Continues to attract new users interested in Arm.
• 70 attendees at OpenMP workshop on GPU @ SC19 using Isambard
• Should be able to provide more specific updates once the annual report is submitted at the end of the month

HPC Mid+

• Drop in usage recently - chasing users to try get people to use it up
  • Comment that fluctuations in usage are often seen - tempting to try and post-rationalise to events or other things going on but very difficult to actually link drops to real sociological causes.
• Struggling to get licensed software configured and running correctly
  • Many sites noted that they also have problems with this

Other topics

Reporting service metrics

• How do different services report service time?
  • Depends on ticketing system
  • Question maybe more suited to the HPC-SIG

Shared HPC RSE knowledge base

• Blog article on shared UK HPC knowledge base published at: http://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/blog/2019/11/uk-public-hpc-knowledge-base
• Will propose discussion of this as a topic for the next HPC-SIG meeting and plan to do something at next HPC Champions workshop (if not before)
• May also put in a proposal for the next RSE conference on this

HPC Champions

• Started to think about HPC Champions workshops for next year

Upcoming training, events and meetings

• Upcoming ARCHER Training Opportunities. Full details and registration at http://www.archer.ac.uk/training/index.php
  • Shared-memory Programming with OpenMP - Online course, four Wednesday afternoons, 13, 20, 27 November and 4 December 2019
  • Enabling multi-node MPI parallelisation of the LISFLOOD flood inundation model, Online webinar, 4 December 2019 15:00
  • HPC Carpentry, EPCC, Edinburgh, 9-10 December 2019
  • Hands-on Introduction to HPC, EPCC, Edinburgh, 7-8 January 2020
  • GPU Programming with CUDA, EPCC, Edinburgh, 9-10 January 2020
  • Advanced MPI, Imperial College London, 27-28 January 2020

Date of next meeting

1400 UK Time, TBC Jan 2019