---------------------------------------------------------------------- H H PPP CCC UK NATIONAL HPC SERVICE H H P P C C -------------------------- HHHHH PPP C x x EPCC and CCLRC Daresbury H H P C C xx Laboratory are members of H H P CCC x x the HPC-UK partnership ---------------------------------------------------------------------- HPCx User Mailing 097 2 June 2006 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Contents ** DEISA Extreme Computing Initiative - second call for proposals ** SMT - Simultaneous MultiThreading on HPCx ** User Group Meeting: Access Grid, 28 June ** CSAR to HPCx: Porting workshop notes ** AMBER 9 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Greetings-- DEISA EXTREME COMPUTING INITIATIVE - SECOND CALL FOR PROPOSALS DEISA is consortium of leading national supercomputing centres that currently deploys and operates a persistent, production quality, distributed supercomputing environment with continental scope. The purpose of the DEISA Extreme Computing Initiative (DECI) is to enhance the impact of the DEISA research infrastructure on leading European science and technology. This initiative consists in the identification, enabling, deployment and operation of "flagship applications" in selected areas of science and technology. These leading, ground breaking applications must deal with complex, demanding, innovative simulations that would not be possible without the DEISA infrastructure, and which would benefit - if accepted - from the exceptional resources from the Consortium. The 2nd call for challenging projects and applications from computational sciences has been launched. In addition to providing resources from the DEISA infrastructure, support for complex application enabling will be made available. Deadline for proposals will be July 15, 2006. Please visit http://www.deisa.org/applications/index.php for more details. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- SMT - SIMULTANEOUS MULTITHREADING ON HPCx In general, the execution of real applications results in the functional units of the processor remaining idle for a high percentage of the total number of processor cycles. Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) aims to reduce this inefficiency by allowing multiple threads (e.g. MPI tasks or OpenMP threads) to simultaneously access the resources of one physical processor. The processors on HPCx support SMT with two threads per processor. Enabling SMT has been found to improve the performance of some real codes, and requires no modification the source code. A full discussion of SMT on HPCx can be found in the HPCx Technical Note HPCxTR0604 "An Investigation of Simultaneous Multithreading on HPCx", by A. Gray, J. Hein, M. Plummer, A. Sunderland, L. Smith, A. Simpson, A. Trew, which can be found here: http://www.hpcx.ac.uk/research/hpc/technical_reports/HPCxTR0604.pdf This includes details of the changes you need to make to your jobscript in order to use it. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- USER GROUP MEETING There will be a meeting of the HPCx User Group of June 28, 2006, at 2:00 pm. There will be presentations about SMT (see above) and the use of the tape archive. This will also be an opportunity to discuss any issues you may have. Senior members of HPCx staff will be present. The meeting will be held over Access Grid in the "University of Edinburgh (EPCC)" virtual venue available from any of the AGSC venue servers. See http://www.agsc.ja.net/ for information on how to connect to these servers. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- CSAR to HPCx: PORTING WORKSHOP NOTES On 25th May, HPCx and CSAR, as members of the hPC-UK consortium, collaborated to run a one-day workshop in Manchester, aimed at helping users who would shortly be moving their work from CSAR to HPCx. This provided information about the differences between the two systems and hands-on help in porting codes. For prospective users of HPCx who were unable to attend the course the course material is now available online at: http://www.hpcx.ac.uk/support/training/HPCxCSARPorting.html Further HPCx training material can be found at: http://www.hpcx.ac.uk/support/training/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- AMBER 9 NOW AVAILABLE Amber 9, the latest version, has now been installed on HPCx. It's available now to all users who have been given access to the Amber installation in the past. The executable can be found in the same location as the older Amber 8 executables, which remain available. Users who wish to access Amber but have not yet requested access should contact the helpdesk if they wish to use the software on HPCx. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Regards --John ---------------------------------------------------------------------- HPC-UK partnership: http://www.hpc-uk.ac.uk ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Earlier mailings: http://www.hpcx.ac.uk/support/notices/index.html To be removed from the mailing list: log into your website account, go to the "Update" page, and click the "Opt out of user emails" field; then click "Commit update". -- John Fisher j.fisher@epcc.ed.ac.uk HPCx User Administration and Helpdesk HPCx: http://www.hpcx.ac.uk Helpdesk: support@hpcx.ac.uk Phone: +44 131 650 5029 Fax: +44 131 650 6555