EVENTS COMING UP

Unless stated otherwise, all events take place at the SciNet Headquarters, Rm 235 of 256 McCaul Street, Toronto. All events below are free for users but we ask that you sign up (“enroll”) on the education website.

• Tuesdays and Thursdays, 11:00 am – 12:00 noon

  November 5 – 28

  INTRODUCTION TO RESEARCH COMPUTING WITH PYTHON

  Learn about research computing even with little programming experience. Basics of programming in python, best practices and visualization will be covered in 8 lectures.

  This course can be taken as a “mini-course” by astrophysics graduate students and as a “modular course” by physics graduate students.

  Participation also counts towards the SciNet Scientific Computing Certificate.

  For more information go to the course website.

  Note: this course has already started.

• Tuesday November 26, 2:30 pm – 3:30 pm

  COAST-TO-COAST SEMINAR

  Collaboration across disciplines in the design of effective technologies to support older adults

  Dr. Alex Mihailidis (University of Toronto)

  Abstract:

  As the complexity in the needs of older adults continues to increase, so do the requirements from the technologies that we are designing. No longer can we take a uni-dimensional approach in the design approach that has often been used in the past, but research and development in this field requires input from a multitude of stakeholders, who must all play a greater role in our traditional design methodologies. The talk will discuss how collaboration across different technical and clinical disciplines is needed to design technologies that can effectively support and help older adults. It will discuss different approaches that are currently being used to include end users in the design process, and will present examples of technologies that have been developed.

• Wednesday December 11, 10:30 am – 11:30 am

  INTRO TO SCINET

  A class of approximately 90 minutes where you will learn how to use the systems. Experienced users may still pick up some valuable pointers during these sessions.

  Participation counts towards the SciNet HPC Certificate.

  For more information and enrollment, go to the course website

• Wednesday December 11, 12:00 noon – 1:00 pm

  SCINET USER GROUP (SNUG) MEETING

  TechTalk: TBA

  For more information and enrollment, go to the course website.

• Winter 2014:

  SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING COURSE

  Many computational projects start off with knowledge of the science you want to do, and with a bit of programming experience. It can be an arduous journey to get to a (maintainable) piece of code which you trust to compute the right thing. This course is aimed at reducing your struggle, and make you a more efficient computational scientist. Topics include well-established best practices for developing software as it applies to scientific computations, common numerical techniques and packages (so you don’t reinvent the wheel), and aspects of high performance computing.

  The course consists of three parts:

  1. Scientific Software Development & Design
  2. Numerical Tools for Physical Scientists
  3. High Performance Scientific Computing

  Each part consists of eight lectures of one hour. Students with limited programming experience are encouraged to take “Introduction to Research Computing” first (see above).

  Note that these parts can be taken as “mini-courses” by astrophysics graduate students and as “modular courses” by physics graduate students.

  Participation in parts 1 and 2 counts towards the SciNet Scientific Computing Certificate.

  Participation in part 3 counts towards the SciNet HPC Certificate.

  For more information (soon) and enrollment, go to
  the course website for the first part,
  the course website for the second part, or
  the course website for the third part.

SYSTEM NEWS

• The user-contributed x86 system “Sandy” is now available for job submission by other SciNet users as well. Jobs would be scheduled with default priority, depending on node availability. This Sandybridge x86 cluster has 76 nodes with 16 cores and 64GB of RAM per node. For more information on the system and how to use it, see the wiki.

• Access to the user-contributed GPU system “Gravity” can now be requested by users (similar to ARC). Gravity is a cluster of 49 nodes, each node with 12 cores, 32 GB, and two NVIDIA Tesla M2090 GPUs. The GPUs have CUDA capability 2.0, 512 CUDA cores and 6 GB of RAM. For more information on the system and how to use it, see the wiki.

• BGQ: Papi 5.2.0, a library to access performance counters, installed.

• BGQ: MemP 1.0.3, a memory profiling tool, installed.

• GPC: Octopus 4.1.1, an ab-initio package, installed.

• GPC: SamTools, a sequence alignment/map format library, installed.

• GPC: PFFT 1.0.7-alpha, a parallel portable library for computing fast Fourier transforms, installed.

• GPC: Trilinos 11.4.2 module installed.

• GPC: Open Babel 2.3.2 module installed.

• GPC: Ncview 2.1.2 module installed.

• GPC: NetCDF 4.2.1.1 modules installed.

• GPC: HDF5 1.8.11 modules installed.

• GPC: Parallel netCDF 1.3.1 modules for intelmpi and openmpi installed on GPC

• GPC: GDAL 1.9.2 installed as a module

• BGQ: MemP 1.0.3, a memory profiling tool installed.

• P7: Gcc 4.8.1 installed.

• GPC: Rsync 3.1.0 installed as a module.

• GPC: User-space MySQL module installed.

ADDED TO THE WIKI

All new wiki content below is listed and linked on the main page.

• Instructions on using “Sandy” and “Gravity” (links are in the sidebar)

• Slides of the MPI 3.0 Developer Seminar

• Slides of the SNUG TechTalk on MySQL on GPC

• Slides and Recordings of the Intro to Relational Databases

• Slides and Recordings of the first four lectures of Research
  Computing with Python

WHAT HAPPENED AT SCINET IN THE LAST MONTH?

• October 16: SNUG Meeting with TechTalk on MySQL on GPC

• October 23: SciNet developer seminar on MPI 3

• October 30: Relational database basics

• November 13: SNUG Meeting with TechTalk on Molecular Motors by Peter Colberg

• Nov 4-14: First four lectures of Research Computing with Python