EVENTS COMING UP

• Tue Oct 4, 2:00 pm: MAINTENANCE SHUTDOWN FOR DATA CENTRE TRANSFORMERS

  All logins and jobs will be killed at that time. Power may not be restored until midnight.

• Thu Oct 6, 1:00-3:00 pm: INFORMATION SESSION FOR NRAC APPLICATIONS

  Meet with SciNet analysts to discuss your application for the yearly round of national resource allocations. The call for proposals can be found here: https://computecanada.org/?mod=cms&pageId=1663&lang=EN&

• Wed Oct 12, 12:00 noon: SNUG (SCINET USERS GROUP) 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

  • A TechTalk by Manuel Saldana (Arch Es Computing) on “MPI as a programming model for High-Performance Reconfigurable Computers”
  • User discussion
  • Pizza!

  Sign up at https://support.scinet.utoronto.ca/courses/?q=node/34

• Tue Oct 18, 3:00 pm: DEADLINE FOR NRAC APPLICATIONS

  The application website is https://ccdb.computecanada.org/allocation/resource_applications. Note that an information session will be held on Oct 6 (see above).

• Wed Oct 26: INTRODUCTION TO SCIENTIFIC PROGRAMMING WITH MODERN FORTRAN

  This full-day course will demonstrate how to use modern features of Fortran. It will cover the use of modules to break code into type-safe pieces; optional arguments and the use of interface; portable ways of using different sizes of integers and reals; an introduction to object-oriented programming in Fortran 2003; and a preview of co-arrays for parallel programming in Fortran 2008.

  More info and sign-up at https://support.scinet.utoronto.ca/courses/?q=node/41

• Wed Nov 9 and Dec 14: 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=SNUG_Meetings

• Wed Nov 23: VISUALIZING DATA WITH PARAVIEW

  Given at SciNet by our colleague from UOIT/SharcNet, Alex Razoumov.

  More details to come soon at https://support.scinet.utoronto.ca/courses/?q=node/46.

• Fri Nov 4,11,18,25, 2011: SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING 1: SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT AND DESIGN

  Note: in contrast to an earlier announcement, the lectures will be given on Fridays, from 9:30 to 11:30.

  See below for more details of the course.

  Sign-up for this part only: https://support.scinet.utoronto.ca/courses/?q=node/43

  You can also sign up for all three parts, see below.

• Fall/Winter: SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING COURSE

  Many computational projects start off with knowledge of the science you want to do, and with a bit of programming experience. It can be an arduous journey to get to a (maintainable) piece of code which you trust to compute the right thing. This course is aimed at reducing your struggle, and make you a more efficient computational scientist. Topics include well-established best practices for developing software as it applies to scientific computations, common numerical techniques and packages (so you don’t reinvent the wheel), and aspects of high performance computing.

  The course consists of three parts: Part 1: Scientific Software Development & Design (Nov 4,11,18,25) Part 2: Numerical Tools for Physical Scientists (Jan 13,20,27 & Feb 3) Part 3: High Performance Scientific Computing (Feb 10,17 & Mar 2,9) + A wrap-up lecture on Mar 16. Each part consists of four lectures of two hours. You can sign up for separate parts, or for the course as a whole.

  More details, including the full syllabus, grading, and signup, can be found at https://support.scinet.utoronto.ca/courses/?q=node/39

  Note that these parts can be taken as “mini-courses” by astrophysics graduate students; we are talking to other departments to see if this can be extended to their grad students as well.

• Mon Dec 12, 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

• Thu Jan 13,20,27, Feb 3, 2012: SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING 2: NUMERICAL TOOLS FOR PHYSICAL SCIENTISTS Sign-up: https://support.scinet.utoronto.ca/courses/?q=node/44
• Thu Feb 10,17, Mar 2,9, 2012: SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING 3: HIGH PERFORMANCE SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING Sign-up: https://support.scinet.utoronto.ca/courses/?q=node/45

SYSTEM CHANGES

• File system: In the near future, the home, scratch, project and hpss file systems will be restructured (note: not all users have access to the latter two). As a consequence, users’ files will reside in different (absolute) locations than before. The home and scratch file system will be group-based, and groups will furthermore be clustered by the initial letter of the group name. For instance, the current home directory of user ‘resu’ in group ‘puorg’ would move from /home/resu to /home/p/puorg/resu. Likewise, /scratch/resu would be moved to /scratch/p/puorg/resu.

  To facilitate the transition, we ask the user’s cooperation in making sure all their scripts and applications only use relative paths, or use the predefined variables $HOME, $SCRATCH and $PROJECT.

• GPC: an OS update from Centos 5.6 to CentOS 6 is being prepared, which will include updates to other programs (perl,gcc,python) as well. A few nodes are using this as a test already, and we are in the process of porting all the modules to the new OS. We encourage users willing to try the new environment out to contact us. Note that the ARC already uses the newer OS.

ADDED TO THE WIKI AND COURSE WEBSITE IN SEPTEMBER

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

• Slides of the latest INTRO TO SCINET session.
• Slides of the SciNet presentations given at the SciNet GPU Workshop Sept 2011
• Slides of the SNUG TechTalk on HPSS given on Sep 14.

WHAT ELSE HAPPENED AT SCINET IN SEPTEMBER?

• Fri Sept 9: Intro to SciNet
• Wed Sept 14: SNUG meeting with a TechTalk by Jaime Pinto (SciNet) on “HPSS – SciNet’s storage capacity expansion”.
• Mon Sept 26: GPGPU workshop with talks by Jianwen Zhu (Electrical and Computer Engineering) on “Some Applications of GPGPU on Electronic Design Automation” and by Peter Colberg (Chemical Physics Theory Group) on “Multi-Particle Collision Dynamics on GPUs”
• Fri Sept 30: full day Parallel I/O course