To all taki users,

Both taki login nodes (taki-usr1.rs.umbc.edu and taki-usr2.rs.umbc.edu) are now available for use.

Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns by submitting a descriptive help request form found at the following link.

Roy Prouty

HPC System Administrator

To all HPCF users,

On Tuesday April 12, 2022 both HPCF clusters (ada & taki) as well as the other compute systems that make use of HPCF Research Storage will be down and inaccessible from 5pm - 9pm ET. 

Once our work is done on Tuesday, we will make another announcement.

As always, let us know if you have any questions or concerns by submitting a descriptive help request form found at the following link.

Roy Prouty

HPCF System Administrator

All taki users,

We'd like to announce that all 2018 and 2021 hardware now has Sub-NUMA Clustering (SNC) enabled. You can read more about SNC at the link below.

Additionally, the Intel 2021b toolchain is now the default Intel toolchain module. Please be aware that this change will affect any user using the default module environment.

As always, please file a ticket at the link below if you have any questions or concerns.

Thanks!

Roy Prouty

System Administrator

SNC: 

- https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-us/000176921/bios-characterization-for-hpc-with-intel-cascade-lake-processors

- https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/technical/xeon-processor-scalable-family-technical-overview.html

RT Ticket: https://doit.umbc.edu/request-tracker-rt/doit-research-computing/

Dear taki Users, dear colleagues, dear students,

I am writing as chair of the governance committee and faculty-lead for the user support in HPCF.

It was great to have people visit with me, the HPCF RAs Carlos Barajas and Dan Kelly, and the system administrators Roy Prouty and Randy Philipp.

A recording of the meeting is now available in Panopto at the link

You may need to be logged in to UMBC before, maybe on the VPN.

Remember to send me citations for papers as well as theses!

Thank you all,

Matthias Gobbert, Math & Stat, gobbert@umbc.edu,

chair, HPCF Governance Committee

Dear taki Users, dear colleagues, dear students,

I am writing as chair of the governance committee and faculty-lead for the user support in HPCF.

First of all, I am glad that you are all users of our system! We hope that it is useful to you and enables you to conduct more research.

Then as general reminders:

- For all, please send me citations for papers and theses (undergrad, Master's, PhD)! This is for our HPCF Publications webpage and our most important documentation of the success of HPCF.

- For PIs, you might want to review the users who have access to your group's data. These are the users in your Unix group. You can see the usernames of all from the output of the "getent group" command; to see your own group's users only, pipe the output into the grep command.  For instance, for me with username gobbert, my group is pi_gobbert, so I issue the command

getent group | grep pi_gobbert

to see all users who are in my Unix group. The point is that some of your students may have graduated or some previous collaborators are not active any more.

- For PIs, if you could, review which projects we list for your group.  Maybe you have new/additional ones (or maybe we failed to post ones that you submitted). Just send me the title, abstract, and people involved.

Finally, the real point of this message is that I am offering to meet with all interested in an online user meeting. Rough agenda:

1. Welcome, thank-you, introductions of HPCF staff and all attendees.

2. Review of the HPCF webpage, in particular, of the systems available.

3. Overview of ongoing projects to improve documentation (Matlab, R).

4. Collection of technical questions and comments on the existing systems.

5. Collection of suggestions for the future.

6. If needed, meeting of PIs only.

The meeting will be in one week, the Friday before the start of the spring 2022 semester, that is, Friday 01/28/2022, 11:00-12:00, online in my personal room at https://umbc.webex.com/meet/gobbert

Thank you all,

Matthias Gobbert, Math & Stat, gobbert@umbc.edu,

chair, HPCF Governance Committee

module load MATLAB

The older versions of Matlab are also still available in case you need to use them. You can see the versions of Matlab we currently have installed on Taki with this command:

module spider MATLAB

Let us know if you have any problems by submitting tickets at this address:

https://doit.umbc.edu/request-tracker-rt/doit-research-computing/

-----------------

Randy Philipp

Dear Researchers, Colleagues, and Students,

Technical staff from NVIDIA will give us a 30 minute intro call to go over their new product releases and see how NVIDIA might be able to help us escalate our AI initiatives and speak to our current use cases and projects.

This is this Wednesday, 10/13/2021, 01:00 p.m. at the conference line 703-871-85

02 (passcode/roomcode 3761).

If you cannot make it, but would like me to send you a copy of the notes that I intend to take, please drop me a note in conventional e-mail.

Even if you intend to attend synchronously, you may want to send me questions beforehand, so I can share them with NVIDIA by e-mail for preparation. For instance, what applications do you use or wish to use on GPUs? What programming language (CUDA or OpenCL?)? What is limiting you from accomplishing more?

Matthias Gobbert, Mathematics and Statistics, gobbert@umbc.edu

(Chair of the HPCF Governance Committee)

module spider intel

Please let us know if you have any questions.

You can use the following page to submit a support request:

/https://doit.umbc.edu/request-tracker-rt/doit-research-computing/

-------------

Randy Philipp

Senior HPC System Administrator

This is just an update regarding a new set of software packages now available on the taki cluster environment, CDO. 

From the requestor and main CDO site (https://code.mpimet.mpg.de/projects/cdo/).

CDO is a set of command line operations geared toward analysis of geophysical data, especially from climate numerical weather prediction models.  Operations include, among many others, horizontal re-gridding and vertical interpolation, various forms of temporal averaging, and the addition or subtraction of variables across different files. They can be applied to netCDF4 and GRIB files. Users outside of the atmospheric science community may find many of the CDO operations useful, but note that some will only work if the data includes geographical dimensions.

For information on loading CDO and associated modules into your user environment, run `module spider CDO`.

Thanks for reading,

Intel reported in a blog this week that its adoption of the open source LLVM architecture for Intel’s C/C++ compiler is complete. The transition is part of Intel’s ongoing effort to boost oneAPI as the preferred tool suite for programming Intel’s growing portfolio diverse processors including CPUs, FPGAs, and GPUs.

See the link for further details.