COMING UP:

• Wed Mar 9, 12:00 noon: SNUG (SCINET USERS GROUP) MEETING
  • Two TechTalks
    1. Abdul Mroue: “Numerical Simulations of Precessing Binary Black Holes”
    2. Joachim Harnois-Deraps: “Uncertainty in Weak Gravitational Lensing with N-Body Simulations”
  • User discussion
  • Pizza!

  Sign up if you are planning to come, at https://support.scinet.utoronto.ca/courses/?q=node/17

• Tue Mar 15: INTRODUCTION TO SCIENTIFIC C++

  This is a one-day course that will introduce you to the various features of C++ with a focus on those that are useful for scientific software development. We will take the C-to-C++ route, so familiarity with C, in particular with pointers, is a prerequisite. We will cover:

  • a basic refresher of C;
  • the nice features of C++ (“a better C”);
  • object oriented programming (classes, inheritance, …);
  • very basic generic programming with templates;
  • a discussion of some useful libraries out there.

  Sign up at https://support.scinet.utoronto.ca/courses/?q=node/20

  If you are unsure about the prerequisites, contact us at support@scinet.utoronto.ca.

• Wed Apr 13: SNUG MEETING (with TechTalk by Peter Colberg)
• Tue Apr 19: INTRODUCTION TO SCIENTIFIC PROGRAMMING WITH MODERN FORTRAN
• May 9-13: 5-DAY PARALLEL PROGRAMMING COURSE

  OpenMP, MPI and more will be covered. The aim is for you to leave the course able to start parallelizing your code. There will likely be a fee for this one.

  See https://support.scinet.utoronto.ca/courses for details and registration on the above SNUGs and courses.

ADDED TO THE WIKI IN FEBRUARY:

(All new wiki content below is listed and linked on the main page: https://support.scinet.utoronto.ca/wiki/index.php/SciNet_User_Support_Library#What.27s_New_On_The_Wiki)

• Links to the documentation of version 12 of the Intel compilers were added to the Tutorials and Manuals section.
• Documentation for using the Integrated Performance Monitor for MPI jobs on GPC and TCS has been added to the Introduction to Performance page of the wiki.
• Slides of the February TechTalks by Seth Dworkin and Ramses van Zon were added to the SNUG TechTalks page.
• Instruction on how to reset the password for your Compute Canada and your SciNet account were added to the FAQ.

SYSTEM CHANGES:

• TCS: The showstart command has been disabled as it appears to contain a bug that puts jobs in a ‘hold’ state.
• GPC: The temporary location of standard input and output files was moved from the shared file system /scratch/$USER/.pbs_spool to the node-local directory /var/spool/torque/spool (which resides in ram). The final location after a job has finished is unchanged, but to check the output/error of running jobs, users will now have to ssh into the head node and look in /var/spool/torque/spool.

  This alleviates access contention to the temporary directory, especially for those users that are running a lot of jobs, and reduces the burden on the file system in general.

  Note that it is good practice to redirect output to a file rather than to count on the scheduler to do this for you.

WHAT ELSE HAPPENED AT SCINET IN FEBRUARY?

• A SNUG meeting was held on Feb 8, with TechTalks from Seth Dworkin and Ramses van Zon.
• On Feb 22 and 23, Science Illustrated, a two-day workshop on the technical and compositional techniques for creating good visualizations of scientific data, was held. This event was organized by Mubdi Rahman in collaboration with SciNet and other sponsors, and two of our analysts gave presentations. More information as well as the videos of the talks will be available soon at http://www.scienceillustrated.ca.
• There was short scheduled downtime on Feb 24 to fix the cooling system.