EVENTS COMING UP

• Fri Sept 9, 12:00 noon: INTRO TO SCINET

  Learn what SciNet resources are available and how to use them, in approximately 90 minutes. Extremely useful for new users, but experienced users may still pick up some valuable pointers. This is a repeat of the Aug 26 session.

  Sign up at https://support.scinet.utoronto.ca/courses/?q=node/32.

• Wed Sept 14, 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 Jaime Pinto (SciNet) on “HPSS – SciNet’s storage capacity expansion”
  • User discussion
  • Pizza!

  Sign up at https://support.scinet.utoronto.ca/courses/?q=node/33

• Wed Oct 12, 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

• Mon Sept 26, 2:00pm-5:00pm: GPGPU WORKSHOP

  SciNet presentation:

  • “GPGPU Activities and Support at SciNet”

  Research talks:

  • Jianwen Zhu (Electrical and Computer Engineering) “Some Applications of GPGPU on Electronic Design Automation”
  • Peter Colberg (Chemical Physics Theory Group) “Multi-Particle Collision Dynamics on GPUs”

  More info and sign-up at https://support.scinet.utoronto.ca/courses/?q=node/38

• Wed Sept 28, 10am-3:30pm: SCINET’S RESEARCH COMPUTING CONSULTING CLINIC

  Thinking of starting a compute-intensive research project? In the middle of one but stuck on what technique or method to use?

  Once a month, the experts at SciNet, Canada’s largest supercomputing centre, will have a consulting desk open for all research members of the larger University community to help them design and make decisions about their computational research tools. These clinics will usually be held on the days of the SciNet users group meetings, the 3rd Wednesday of the month, which attendees are welcome to attend.

  To mark the start of the school year, this month’s clinic will be at a special date: Wed, 28 Sept, 10am-4:30pm. For the rest of the semester, it will be held at the third Wednesday of the month, 10am-12pm, 1:30pm-3:30pm.

• Fri Sept 30: PARALLEL I/O COURSE

  Learn how to avoid I/O becoming the bottleneck in your large-scale computation; general strategies as well as true parallel I/O techniques (MPI-IO, HDF5, and NetCDF) will be covered in this one-day course.

  More info and sign-up at https://support.scinet.utoronto.ca/courses/?q=node/40

• 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

• 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 3,10,17,24) 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, etc., 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.

• Thu Nov 3,10,17,24, 2011: SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING 1: SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT AND DESIGN Sign-up: https://support.scinet.utoronto.ca/courses/?q=node/43
• 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

• 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.
• GPC: “Climate Data Operator” versions 1.4.6 and 1.5.1 are available as modules cdo/1.4.6 and cdo/1.5.1, respectively.
• GPC: The “Climate Model Output Rewriter” is installed as module cmor/2.7.1.
• GPC: a newer version of R can now be used by explicitly loading the module R/2.13.1, while R/2.11.1 remains the default.
• GPC: ffmpeg has been added to the ImageMagick module.

ADDED TO THE WIKI AND COURSE WEBSITE IN AUGUST

(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 1-day intro to GPGPU using CUDA Course.
• Slides of the latest INTRO TO SCINET session.
• Update info on how to distinguish what cluster you are on in the .bashrc file.
• The course website now has a link to past courses at the top, so it is now easier to find slides and/or movies of past events.

WHAT ELSE HAPPENED AT SCINET IN AUGUST?

• A one-day course on General Purpose GPU computing with CUDA was held on Aug 22. This is one of the first of many GPGPU activities to come, now that the University of Toronto has been recognized as a NVIDIA Teaching Centre as well as an NVIDIA Research Centre (a collaborative effort of SciNet and the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics, the University of Toronto’s Institute for Aerospace Studies and Departments of Chemistry, Biochemistry, and Electrical and Computer Engineering, and the Medical Image Analysis Laboratory at Sunnybrooke Hospital).
• The first “Intro to SciNet” session held given on Aug 26.
• A leak in the cooling system was discovered in the data centre, leading to two emergency shutdowns. Repairs have been made.