Summary

• Increased security of the SciNet data centre
• Decommissioning of the SOSCIP BlueGene/Q at the end of June.
• Announcement of several training opportunities.

Details can be found below and are also available on the SciNet education website https://courses.scinet.utoronto.ca and the SciNet wiki https://docs.scinet.utoronto.ca.

System News

• The security level of the data centre has been increased by disabling certain weak encryption algorithms and certain weak public key types and by regenerating Niagara’s host keys. The latter requires users to replace their ssh clients stored host key for Niagara upon first login after the shutdown. If you have not done so yet, the details of how to do this can be found on https://docs.scinet.utoronto.ca/index.php/SSH_Changes_in_May_2019.
• The SOSCIP BGQ will be decommissioned on June 30, 2019. The P7 cluster will be decommisioned at the same time. The file system of the BGQ, which is shared with the SOSCIP GPU Cluster, will remain active, and the BGQ front-end node (bgqdev.scinet.utoronto.ca) will remain up for the foreseeable future to allow users to access their files. If you have further questions regarding the decommisioning of the BGQ, write to support@scinet.utoronto.ca. For general questions regarding SOSCIP, write to info@soscip.org.

Events Coming Up

Unless stated otherwise, all events listed below are free of charge and take place at the SciNet Teaching Room or Boardroom at our offices on the eleventh floor of the MaRS West Tower, suite 1140A (661 University Avenue, Toronto ON M5G 1M1).

Most events are recorded and some are broadcast, but only some of the courses can be taken remotely for SciNet certificate credits.

Registration for SciNet courses should be done by logging into https://courses.scinet.utoronto.ca with your Compute Canada account (the same one that you use to log into Niagara).

• INTRO TO SCINET AND NIAGARA Wednesday June 12, 10:00 am – 11:30 am SciNet Boardroom (suite 1140, 661 University Avenue, Toronto ON M5G 1M1).

  This is a class of approximately 60-90 minutes to introduce SciNet and the Niagara supercomputer and teach you how to use it.

  Participation counts towards the SciNet HPC Certificate.

  For more information and registration, go to https://scinet.courses/465

• SCINET USER GROUP MEETING Wednesday June 12, 12:00 noon – 1:00 pm SciNet Boardroom (suite 1140, 661 University Avenue, Toronto ON M5G 1M1).

  Pizza, user discussion, and a tech talk by Ramses van Zon on

  “No Conda: Using Python, Installing Packages, and Accessing Jupyter Notebooks on Niagara”

  Abstract: If you want to know how to use install specific Python packages or how to use jupyter notebooks, most instructions that you find these days will tell you to use anaconda or miniconda. While very convenient on your own personal computer, conda comes with substantial storage inefficiencies and conflicts with other software, and is therefore not the recommended option on supercomputers. In this techtalk, we will explain and demonstrate how you can instead use virtual environments instead of conda environments, and use Niagara’s JupyterHub instance (which also supports R and can be made to work with Julia as well).

  For sign up and more information, see https://scinet.courses/471

• COMPUTE ONTARIO SUMMER SCHOOL West – Hamilton June 10-14, 2019 Central – Toronto, June 24-28, 2019 East – Ottawa, July 8-12, 2019

  The Compute Ontario Summer School on Scientific and High Performance Computing is an annual educational event for graduate/undergraduate students, postdocs and researchers to learn and share knowledge and experience in high performance and technical computing on modern HPC platforms.

  As in previous years, the 2019 Summer School will have three instances, “West”, “Central”, and “East”. Each will be a week-long event with multiple parallel streams.

  Registration for the central instance will be open until June 17, 2019, see https://scinet.courses/438

• SCALING TO PETASCALE INSTITUTE August 19-23, 2019

  This is a free virtual advanced HPC summer school, organized by a number of the US XSEDE sites and SciNet. include OpenMP, MPI, CUDA, and OpenACC.

  More details can be found at https://bluewaters.ncsa.illinois.edu/petascale-computing-2019

• Intro to GIT Version Control Friday October 4, 2019, 1pm – 4pm Teaching Room 1140A (MaRS West Tower, 661 University Ave, Toronto)

  Introductory workshop to get started in the usage of version control GIT. This workshop is held in collaboration with UofT-Libraries and UofT graduate students could gain GPS credits.

  For sign up and more information, see https://scinet.courses/467

• INTRODUCTION TO PROGRAMMING October 2019 Tuesdays and Thursdays, 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm Four weeks starting Oct 1. Teaching Room 1140A (MaRS West Tower, 661 University Ave, Toronto)

  New to programming? Learn the basics of programming using the python programming language in eight one-hour sessions over the course of four weeks. Sessions will consist of a mix of lectures and hands-on exercises.

  Participation counts towards the SciNet Scientific Computing Certificate.

  For sign up and more information, see https://scinet.courses/472

• NUMERICAL COMPUTING WITH PYTHON November 2019 Tuesdays and Thursdays, 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm Four weeks, starting Nov 5, 2019 Teaching Room 1140A (MaRS West Tower, 661 University Ave, Toronto)

  Learn about research computing even with little programming experience. Covers programming in python, best practices and visualization. Experience with python is required. Four home work sets will be the basic of the evaluation.

  Participation counts towards the SciNet Scientific Computing Certificate.

  For sign up and more information, see https://scinet.courses/473

• SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING FOR PHYSICISTS (PHY1610) Winter 2019 Teaching Room 1140A (MaRS West Tower, 661 University Ave, Toronto)

  This course is aimed at reducing your struggle in getting started with computational projects, 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, and aspects of high performance computing. While we will introduce the C++ language, in one language or another, students should already have some programming experience. Despite the title, this course is suitable for many physical scientists (chemists, astronomers, …).

  This course is part of the physics graduate program. Students willing to take the course as part of their graduate program have to enroll through Acorn/ROSI.

  For more information, see https://scinet.courses/468