EVENTS COMING UP

• Wed Dec 14, 2011: 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 a one or two short talks on topics or technologies of interest to the SciNet community.

  This time, we will have

  • Updates on the CentOS 6 switch.
  • “Compiler and optimization flags on the GPC” (TechTalk by Scott Northrup from SciNet)
  • User discussion
  • Pizza!
• Thu Dec 15, 2011: INTRODUCTION TO GPGPU WITH CUDA

  The goal of this course is for incoming students, new to GPGPU but familiar with scientific programming in C, to leave being able to start writing simple kernels for their own problems, and understand the tools, techniques and libraries that will be needed to improve and optimize the results.

  More info and sign up at https://support.scinet.utoronto.ca/courses/?q=node/42

• Mon Jan 9, 2012, 2:00 pm – 4:00 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/55

• Wed Jan 11, 2012, 10:00 am – 11:30 am: 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/56

  Note that subsequently, at noon, there is a SciNet User group meeting (see below) that participants to the intro may be interested in too, but we do ask that you sign up for this separately.

• Jan 11/Feb 8/Mar 14/Apr 11/May 9, 2012, at noon: FUTURE SNUG MEETINGS

  We are still looking for users (students, postdocs, staff, faculty, it does not matter) willing to giving a short talk (20-30 minutes) 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/47 (Jan) https://support.scinet.utoronto.ca/courses/?q=node/48 (Feb) https://support.scinet.utoronto.ca/courses/?q=node/49 (Mar) https://support.scinet.utoronto.ca/courses/?q=node/50 (Apr) https://support.scinet.utoronto.ca/courses/?q=node/51 (May)

• Fri Jan 13,20,27, Feb 3, 2012: SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING 2: NUMERICAL TOOLS FOR PHYSICAL SCIENTISTS

  Part II of SciNet’s Scientific Computing couse. These parts can be taken as “mini-courses” or “modular courses” by astrophysics and physics graduate students.

  Topics of part II: Modelling, floating point computations, validation + verification, visualization, ODEs, Monte Carlo, linear algebra, FFT.

  More info: https://support.scinet.utoronto.ca/courses/?q=node/39 Sign-up: https://support.scinet.utoronto.ca/courses/?q=node/44

• Fri Feb 10,17, Mar 2,9, 2012: SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING 3: HIGH PERFORMANCE SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING

  Part III of SciNet’s Scientific Computing couse. These parts can be taken as “mini-courses” or “modular courses” by astrophysics and physics graduate students.

  Topics of part II: Profiling, optimization, openmp, mpi and hybrid programming.

  More info: https://support.scinet.utoronto.ca/courses/?q=node/39 Sign-up: https://support.scinet.utoronto.ca/courses/?q=node/45

SYSTEM CHANGES

• The home, scratch, project and hpss file systems have been restructured (note: not all users have access to the latter two). As a consequence, users’ files reside in different locations than before. The home and scratch file system are now group-based, and groups are furthermore clustered by the initial letter of the group name. For instance, the current home directory of user ‘resu’ in group ‘puorg’ is now /home/p/puorg/resu.

  The predefined variables $HOME, $SCRATCH, $PROJECT and $ARCHIVE point to the new directories.

• The High-Performance Storage System (HPSS) is in full production with a concurrent change in /project policies. Users with storage allocations greater than 5 TB will find all their former /project files will now reside in HPSS and their /project quotas will be reduced to 5 TB. Because HPSS recalls are much slower than expected (a bug that will hopefully be fixed soon), we closely follow any retrieval jobs that hpss users submit to try and streamline the recall.
• GPC: the OS update from CentOS 5.6 to CentOS 6 is completed. This update include updates to other programs (perl,gcc,python) as well, and to all modules. A small number of nodes still runs CentOS 5, but only for comparison runs. See the wiki on how to request these nodes, and be prepared for longer queuing times if you do.

ADDED TO THE WIKI IN NOVEMBER

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)

• Important updates on the transition to CentOS 6.
• List of installed modules for the CentOS 6 nodes.
• Lectures slides and videos of the first four lectures of the Scientific Computing Course.

WHAT ELSE HAPPENED AT SCINET IN NOVEMBER?

• Transition to CentOS 6 (see above).
• Visualizing data with Paraview, given by SHARCNET collegue Alex Razoumov at SciNet on Wed Nov 23.
• Part I of SciNet mini-course Scientific Computing I – Scientific Software Development, consisting of four lectures.
• SNUG Meeting with a TechTalk on the file system restructuring was held on Nov 9, 2011.
• File system restructuring (see above) on Nov 8.