SYSTEM CHANGES

• The new Resource Allocations will take effect on January 9, for groups who were awarded an allocation.
• There will be a scheduled down-time on January 17/18. We will take that opportunity to update the OS of the login nodes to CentOS 6.
• On January 30th, CentOS 5 will be phased out. If you are still doing comparison runs between the two OSs, make sure that they are done before then.
• The “diskUsage” command has been improved and its output has been simplified.

EVENTS COMING UP

• Mon Jan 9, 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, 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 to the intro may be interested in attending the following event:

• Wed Jan 11: 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

  • TechTalk by Chris Neale: “Kinetics of Hydrophobic Gating and Energetics of Magnesium Permeation in the Bacterial Divalent Cation Transport System CorA” (co-authors: Pawel Pomorski, Nilmadhab Chakrabarti, Emil F. Pai and Régis Pomès)
  • User discussion
  • Pizza!

  Sign up at https://support.scinet.utoronto.ca/courses/?q=node/47

• Feb 8/Mar 14/Apr 11/May 9, 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/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: 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, ODEs, Monte Carlo, linear algebra, FFT.

  More info: wiki.scinet.utoronto.ca/wiki/index.php/Numerical_Tools_for_Physical_Scientists

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

• Fri Feb 10,17, Mar 2,9: 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

ADDED TO THE WIKI IN DECEMBER 2011

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)

• Information about part II of the Scientific Computing Course on “Numerical Tools for Physical Scientists”.
• SNUG Techtalk Dec 2011 “Intel Compiler Optimizations”
• Updates on the GPC transition to CentOS 6.

WHAT ELSE HAPPENED AT SCINET IN DECEMBER 2011?

• On Dec 14 a SciNet User Group (SNUG) Meeting was held with a TechTalk on “Compiler and optimization flags on the GPC” by Scott Northrup from SciNet.
• On Dec 15, a day long intro course on GPGPU programming with CUDA was given.
• A power outage happened at the data center on Dec 28, 2011.