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