You are here: Home News 2015 HPC Newsletter 07/15

HPC Newsletter 07/15

HPC Newsletter 07/15

Dear colleagues,

Welcome to our 7th newsletter in 2015. The specifications for the bwForCluster ENM have been finalized and were handed over to the vendors. We expect final vendor offers by the end of January. This means that the cluster will be delivered by the Easter bunny rather than by Santa Claus.

Meanwhile, in a galaxy not so far away, our sibling bwForCluster MLS&WISO in Mannheim/Heidelberg has officially started and now provides additional HPC resources to researchers in the fields of Molecular Life Science, Economics and Social Sciences.

Wishing you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Your HPC Team, Rechenzentrum, Universität Freiburg

Table of Contents

Upcoming events and important dates

bwForCluster ENM procurement progress

bwForCluster MLS&WISO officially started

HPC workshop in Strasbourg

Embedded HPC courses

Community feedback and support

Virtual Research Environments

Citable Methods

NEMO status

Publications

Upcoming events and important dates

20.01.2016 (to be confirmed): Introduction to HPC, Rechenzentrum Universität Freiburg

For a list of upcoming course opportunities, please see http://www.bwhpc-c5.de/en/course_opportunities.php

bwForCluster ENM procurement progress

The procurement process has arrived at the final stages. The final specifications for the bwForCluster ENM have been transmitted to the vendors and we are expecting their offers by the 22nd of January. The negotiations and subsequent discussions allowed us to significantly reduce the complexity of the original specifications. The final decision on the vendor is supposed to be taken in February and we hope to become ready for production during the second quarter of 2016.

bwForCluster MLS&WISO officially started

In Mannheim and Heidelberg, the combined bwForCluster MLS&WISO is now officially available. It is dedicated to research in Molecular Life Science, Economics and Social Sciences. (The part of the cluster dedicated to scientific computing in methods development is not available as of yet). In accordance to the state-wide HPC strategy (bwHPC), the resources are available to all scientists in Baden-Württemberg working in the above mentioned scientific areas.

For more technical details, and more importantly, for information on how to access the resources once they become generally available, please take a look at the bwHPC Wiki.

HPC workshop in Strasbourg

On November 3rd, a workshop within the framework of EUCOR and the bwHPC initiative took place in Strasbourg. The focus was how to use virtualization in the context of High Performance Computing. Colleagues from Strasbourg, Karlsruhe, and Freiburg took part.
 
The discussion of technical details showed that the concepts used are very much related. In order to ensure continuous exchange of ideas and possible solutions to problems, a subsequent meeting in 2016 is in preparation.

Embedded HPC courses

In addition to our standalone courses "Introduction to HPC computing", the HPC-Team offers lecturers the opportunity to include an HPC part into their courses. In contrast to the abstracted usage scenarios of a generic introduction, this is more "hands-on" and gives a better idea on the practical usefulness of HPC in the respective scientific field. Embedding of HPC courses has worked remarkably well in the field of Neuroscience already: We gave a one-day introduction on HPC in the course "Scientific Programming" and another one-day introduction in the course "Biological Neuronal Networks". In the latter course, HPC resources were used for the remainder of the course.

As a lecturer, if you are interested in embedding an HPC introduction into your course, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Community feedback and support

In parallel to the acquisition process, we intend to continue and expand our efforts on domain specific consultations. To this end, we would like to offer interested communities an on-site presentation of the forthcoming bwForCluster ENM, meaning that we could visit work groups in the fields of Elementary Particle Physics, Neuroscience or Microsystems Engineering at their home universities. Please contact us if you are interested.

For the "grand opening" of the bwForCluster ENM we intend to organize a user assembly in the second quarter of 2016. This will give our user base an opportunity to discuss further plans for cluster governance and cluster extensions.

Virtual Research Environments

Together with partners from other universities, the eScience group of the Rechenzentrum Freiburg has acquired a state sponsored project on "Virtual Research Environments". This acknowledges the fact that in a lot of cases, a scientist will need a predetermined software environment to conduct his research. The project aims at defining an abstraction layer which frees the scientist from the task to setup this environment all by himself. Instead, scientists working in "Virtual Research Environments" will make use of given templates that work "out of the box" on given cloud environments, HPC clusters and possibly even desktop computers alike.

Citable Methods

In another state sponsored project, in cooperation with partners from Freiburg and other universities, the eScience department of the Rechenzentrum Freiburg will investigate "Citable Methods". There is an ever increasing pressure from money granting organizations to publish scientific results acquired through computer simulations or data analysis in a way that they are easily reproducible and citable. With the growing complexity of software environments this is rapidly evolving into one of the big future challenges for scientific computing.

NEMO status

The preliminary bwForCluster NEMO in Freiburg was used for two embedded HPC courses and worked without any problems. We would like to thank Uwe Grauer from the Bernstein Center in Freiburg for taking care of the NEST software packages for both NEMO and the bwUniCluster.

Please note that we will start to enforce memory resource requirements more strictly in the near future. That is, if you request 1 Gigabyte of memory, your job will be terminated instantly once it grows beyond that. Please also note that if you omit a memory resource requirement, a default will be applied. Currently, the default is 1 Gigabyte per requested core.

Publications

Please inform us about any scientific publication and any published work that was achieved by using bwHPC resources (bwUniCluster, bwForCluster JUSTUS or bwForCluster MLS&WISO or pre-bwForCluster NEMO). An informal E-Mail to publications@bwhpc-c5.de is all it takes. Thank you!

Your publication will be referenced on the bwHPC-C5 website:

http://www.bwhpc-c5.de/en/user_publications.php

We would like to stress that it is in our mutual interest to promote all accomplishments which have been made using bwHPC resources. We are required to report to the funding agencies during and at the end of the funding period. For these reports, scientific publications are the most important success indicators. Further funding will therefore strongly depend on both quantity and quality of said publications.


HPC Team, Rechenzentrum, Universität Freiburg
http://www.hpc.uni-freiburg.de

bwHPC-C5 Project
http://www.bwhpc-c5.de

To subscribe to our mailinglist, please send an e-mail to to hpc-news-subscribe@hpc.uni-freiburg.de
If you would like to unsubscribe, please send an e-mail to hpc-news-unsubscribe@hpc.uni-freiburg.de

Previous newsletters: http://www.hpc.uni-freiburg.de/news/newsletters

For questions and support, please use our support address enm-support@hpc.uni-freiburg.de

Filed under: