To keep users posted on what’s going on at SciNet, we send monthly emails with the new features, planned courses and events and accomplishments at SciNet.

Below you will find the salient points of what has happened or changed during the last month and what will happen in the near future. Among these is the announcement of the dates of the “Compute Ontario Summer School on HPC”. There will an installment in Waterloo in May, one in Toronto in June and one in Ottawa in July.

As always, details are available on the wiki or the SciNet education website.

– The SciNet team

Events Coming Up

Unless stated otherwise, all events take place at the SciNet Headquarters, Rm 235 of 256 McCaul Street, Toronto. All events below are free for users but we ask that you sign up (“enroll”) on the education website.

• Thursday March 6, 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm

  SCINET DEVELOPER SEMINAR

  OPENCL MIDDLEWARE

  By AJ Guillon

  AJ will demonstrate new C++11 OpenCL middleware that enables professional software development for heterogeneous computing. This framework significantly reduces programming complexity and extends OpenCL with new features. AJ will also provide an overview of the internal design of the middleware and supporting software stack.

  For more information and enrollment, go to the course website.

• Sunday March 9, 2014

  APPLICATION DEADLINE INTERNATIONAL SUMMER SCHOOL ON HPC

  See below for more information about this expenses-paid summer school on challenges in HPC, held in June in Budapest, Hungary.

• Wednesday March 12, 12:00 noon – 1:00 pm

  SCINET USER GROUP (SNUG) MEETING

  The SciNet Users Group (SNUG) meetings are every month on the second Wednesday, and involve (free) 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:

    Introduction to NetCDF4 binary files with Python, C++ and R

    Bertrand Brelier (IBM@SciNet)

    During the presentation, Bertrand will review some features of NetCDF4, which is a portable binary file format and corresponding library. He will then show an example how to read and write a NetCDF4 compound variable in Python, C++ and R.

  • User discussion
  • Pizza!

  For more information and enrollment, go to the course website.

• Wednesday March 12, 14:30 pm – 15:30 pm

  INTRODUCTION TO GPU COMPUTING USING CUDA

  Scott Northrup (SciNet)

  The CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) parallel programming model harnesses the power of Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs) to enable dramatic increases in computing performance for graphics, 3D content, video and scientific processing-intensive applications. This talk will provide an introduction to CUDA and examples of applications within research. Participants should be familiar with C/C++ development.

  For more information and enrollment, go to the course website.

  This talk is also offered remotely, for details see: https://www.westgrid.ca/events/introduction-to-gpu-computing-using-cuda

• March 11, 13, 18, 20, 25, 27, and April 1 and 3: 11am-12noon

  HIGH PERFORMANCE SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING

  Lectures of Part 3 of the Scientific Computing Course

  Topics: parallel programming concepts, shared memory parallel programming with openmp, distributed memory parallel programming with mpi, hybrid programming.

  Participation counts towards the SciNet HPC Certificate.

  For more information and enrollment, go to the course website.

• Tuesdays, almost bi-weekly, 2:30 pm – 3:30 pm

  COAST-TO-COAST SEMINAR SERIES

  The Coast to Coast Seminar is an hour-long presentation given on a scientific topic and is made accessible to audiences at a number of remote sites across Canada through collaboration technology.

  SciNet is a local seminar location for this series.

  The topic of the Spring 2014 Coast to Coast seminar series is “Technology for Aging Well” and it is built around a pan-Canadian project titled AGE-WELL (Aging Gracefully across Environments using Technology to Support Wellness, Engagement and Long Life.)

  The focus of the series will be a discussion how to use technology in helping support the Canadian aging population to ensure that all Canadians can grow older with dignity and grace.

  Mar 11: Geoff Fernie (U.Toronto)
  
  Mar 25: Alex Mihailidis (U.Toronto) and Rafik A. Goubran (Carleton U)

  For more information see http://www.irmacs.sfu.ca/events/coast-coast-seminars or https://www.westgrid.ca/events/coast-to-coast-seminar-series

• Wednesday April 9, 12:00 noon – 1:00 pm

  SCINET USER GROUP (SNUG) MEETING

  TechTalk: TBA

  For more information and enrollment, go to the course website.

• Wednesday May 14, 12:00 noon – 1:00 pm

  SCINET USER GROUP (SNUG) MEETING

  TechTalk: TBA

  For more information and enrollment, go to the course website.

• Sunday June 1 – Friday June 6, Budapest, Hungary

  5TH INTERNATIONAL SUMMER SCHOOL ON HPC CHALLENGES IN COMPUTATIONAL SCIENCES

  In this summer school, leading American, Canadian, European and Japanese computational scientists and HPC technologists will offer instruction on a variety of topics, including HPC challenges by discipline (e.g., bioinformatics, computer science, chemistry, and physics), HPC programming proficiencies, performance analysis and profiling, algorithmic approaches & numerical libraries, data-intensive computing and scientific visualization.

  Compute Canada/Calcul Canada invites students enrolled in science and engineering fields at Canadian post-secondary institutions to apply for one of 10 (expenses-paid) spots allocated to Canada.

  Interested students should apply by March 9, 2014.

  For more information see http://www.prace-ri.eu/International-Summer-School-2014.

• Monday June 9 – Friday June 13, University of Toronto, St. George Campus

  COMPUTE ONTARIO SUMMER SCHOOL ON HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING/CENTRAL

  The Compute Ontario Summer School on High Performance Computing provides attendees with opportunities to learn and share knowledge and experience in high performance and technical computing.

  As in previous years, the Summer School on High Performance Computing 2014 will have three installments:

  “West” May 26 – 30 Waterloo

  “Central” June 9 – 13 Toronto

  “East” July (TBD) Ottawa

  The format will be a four day workshop with mixed lectures and hands-on sessions on a number of selected subjects, such as MPI, CUDA, OpenMP, and Visualization (these will vary slightly depending on the location).

  This event will *not* be held at the SciNet Headquarters.

  More details regarding the summer school and how to register, will be announced in the future.

• Monday June 23 – Friday June 27

  HPCS 2014: HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING SYMPOSIUM IN HALIFAX

  The 28th annual HPCS conference, will take place in Halifax, June 3-27 (of which the first two days are tutorials). This year’s theme is `HPC Serving Society’. Sessions will focus on Bioinformatics, Big Data & Analytics, Computational Materials Science, Ocean & Atmosphere Modelling, Computational Chemistry, Data Cave Visualization, and more.

  We are seeking submissions for contributed works and posters relating to the conference theme. Submissions for contributed works will be due on April 30.

  More information is available at the conference website, http://2014.hpcs.ca.

System News

• GPC: Ray 2.3.1 installed as a module.
• GPC: Ghostscript added to the Xlibraries module.
• GPC: CP2K (trunk of 25 Feb, 2014) installed as a module.
• GPC: Valgrind 3.9.0 with openmpi 1.6 and intelmpi support installed as a modules.
• ARC/Gravity: Cuda 5.5 installed as a module (cuda 4.1 still the default).

What’s New On The Wiki?

• Slides and Recordings of 6 lectures of the “Numerical Tools for Physical Scientists” mini-course.
• Slides of the TechTalk “Introduction to the Intel Xeon Phi”

What Else Happened at SciNet in the Last Month?

• Feb 12: Intro to SciNet
• Feb 12: SciNet User Group meeting with TechTalk on the Intel Xeon Phi.
• Feb 4-27: Numerical Tools for Physical Scientists mini-course, 6 lectures.