EVENTS COMING UP

• Wed Mar 12, 12:00 noon: SCINET USER GROUP (SNUG) MEETING

  The SciNet Users Group (SNUG) meetings are every month on the second Wednesday, and involve pizza, user discussion, feedback, and one or two short talks on topics or technologies of interest to the SciNet community.

  This time, we will have

  • TechTalk by Ramses van Zon (SciNet) on

    “Intel Math Kernel Library”

    The Intel MKL is a highly optimized, high-performance mathematical library with C, C++ and Fortran, containing among other things implementations for BLAS, LAPACK and FFTW. It is available on the GPC, which has Intel chips for which the MKL is tuned, and has become rather easy to use in recent version of the Intel compiler suite. We will give an overview of the capabilities of this library and how you can use it in your own code.

  • User discussion
  • Pizza!

  Sign up at https://support.scinet.utoronto.ca/courses/?q=node/49

• Mar 16: Final lecture of SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING 3: HIGH PERFORMANCE SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING
• Mar 26, 2:00 pm – 4:30 pm: INTRO TO THE LINUX SHELL

  Extremely useful for new users of SciNet that are not yet familiar with the Linux shell or other unix prompt systems.

  For more information and sign up, go to https://support.scinet.utoronto.ca/courses/?q=node/64

• Mar 28, noon – 1:30 pm: INTRO TO SCINET

  Learn what SciNet resources are available, how to recompile your code and how to use the batch system, in approximately 90 minutes.

  Intended for new users, but experienced users may still pick up some valuable pointers.

  Sign up at https://support.scinet.utoronto.ca/courses/?q=node/63

• SciNet is a local seminar location for the Coast-to-Coast seminar series. Future Dates/times: Mar 20 and Apr 3. 2:30 to 3:30 EST. More info at www.irmacs.sfu.ca/events/coast-coast-seminars.
• Apr 11/May 9, at noon: FUTURE SNUG MEETINGS

  April’s TechTalk will be by Scott Northrup (SciNet) on differences between multinode mpi jobs using ethernet and infiniband.

  We are still looking for users willing to giving a short talk (20-30 minutes) at the May SNUG about interesting work that they did on SciNet clusters and how they did it! If you are up for it, email support@scinet.utoronto.ca.

  More info on future SNUGs and sign-up at https://support.scinet.utoronto.ca/courses/?q=node/50 (Apr) https://support.scinet.utoronto.ca/courses/?q=node/51 (May)

• Apr 23: 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/62

SYSTEM CHANGES

• GPC: Due to some changes we are making to the GigE nodes, if you run multinode ethernet MPI jobs, you still will need to explicitly request the ethernet interface in your mpirun:

  For Openmpi: mpirun –mca btl self,sm,tcp For IntelMPI: mpirun -env I_MPI_FABRICS shm:tcp

  There is no need to do this if you run on IB, or if you run single node mpi jobs on the ethernet (GigE) nodes. Please check the wiki page on ‘GPC MPI Versions’ for more details. We expect these changes to be finished in the next month.

• GPC: A new version of the Intel compiler suite has become the default module. The C/C++ and fortran compilers in this suite are at version 12.1.3, while the MKL library is at version 10.3.9.
• GPC: New versions of parallel-netcdf and mpb have been installed.

ADDED TO THE WIKI IN FEBRUARY/EARLY MARCH 2012

All new wiki content below is listed and linked on the main page: http://wiki.scinethpc.ca/wiki/index.php/SciNet_User_Support_Library#What.27s_New_On_The_Wiki)

• The slides of the lectures of part III of the Scientific Computing Course on “Numerical Tools for Physical Scientists”.
• The list of modules installed on the Power 7 Linux cluster.

WHAT ELSE HAPPENED AT SCINET IN FEBRUARY/EARLY MARCH 2012?

• Feb 11: SNUG meeting was held, with a TechTalk by Jonathan Dursi on “Tuning your MPI application without writing code: mpitune and otpo”.
• Feb 10, 17 and March 2: Three lectures of part 3 of SciNet’s Scientific Computing course on “High Performance Scientific Computing” were given.
• Thu Feb 23 and Fri Feb 24: SciNet hosted and co-taught a Software Carpentry scientific computing boot-camp.