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 099 23 June 2006 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Contents ** User Group Meeting: Access Grid, 28 June ** Closure of CSAR ** Passwords ** Supercomputing resources across Europe available to UK researchers ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Greetings-- USER GROUP MEETING A reminder that there will be a meeting of the HPCx User Group on Wednesday next, June 28, 2006, at 2:00 pm. There will be presentations about SMT (see mailing 97) 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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- CLOSURE OF CSAR Our colleagues at CSAR will be closing their HPC service on 1 July. Our best wishes to them - we are glad that collabration between the HPCx partners and the Manchester team will continue through the UK_HPC partnership. A warm welcome to those people who will now be moving their work to HPCx. Transfer of unused time from CSAR to HPCx ----------------------------------------- If you worked on CSAR and now have a project on HPCx, any time your project has unused when CSAR closes will be transferred to HPCx. Previously the intention was to transfer only time which you had intended to use after the closure of CSAR, but EPSRC has now changed this polcy - ALL remaining time will now be transferred. Time will be converted from Newton and Green CPU Hours to HPCx AUs. The conversion rate is based on the Linpack ratings for the two machines. Projects which so far have existed on both services --------------------------------------------------- The time left unused on CSAR will be added to your HPCx project as soon as possible after the service closes. Projects which are being moved from CSAR to HPCx ------------------------------------------------ Your HPCx projects have now been created. I allocated the same amount of time as your CSAR profile indicated you were planning to use after July 1. It will be adjusted once we know how much time you have left on CSAR when the service closes. Once again, this will done as soon as possible after the service closes. Registering on HPCx ------------------- Everything about accounts, projects, resource allocation and so on can be found in the Admin FAQ, which is here: http://www.hpcx.ac.uk/projects/FAQ/ It really is worth having a look at this. Getting started --------------- The HPCx User Guide is here: http://www.hpcx.ac.uk/support/documentation/UserGuide/HPCxuser/HPCxuser.html Course material for the "Porting Codes form CSAR to HPCx" course, which CSAR and HPCx ran together, can be found here: http://www.hpcx.ac.uk/support/training/HPCxCSARPorting.html Moving your files from CSAR to HPCx ----------------------------------- After 30 June, you will no longer be able to run jobs on the CSAR systems. However, for a while after that you will still be able to log in in order to take your files away. We suggest you do this as soon as you can. Two useful sources of information about this: Materials from the "Data Migration" lecture in the porting course: http://www.hpcx.ac.uk/support/training/HPCxCSARPorting/L05-DataMigration.pdf An HPCx Technical Note: "Transferring large files to and from HPCx": http://www.hpcx.ac.uk/research/hpc/technical_reports/HPCxTR0603.pdf The helpdesk ------------ Please email to: support@hpcx.ac.uk ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PASSWORDS This is about passwords on the service machine itself, not on the website - if you're not sure about the difference, please have a look at the Admin FAQ: http://www.hpcx.ac.uk/projects/FAQ/ The procedure for changing your password when you are logged into the service machine used to be quite complicated and sometimes confusing. It's now been simplified. It's still necessary to use a special node (known as the "password server") to chnage passwords, but this is mostly hidden. The new dialogue looks like this: fred@llf401: passwd Please enter old (i.e. current) password: [TYPE OLD PASSWORD] Please enter new password: [TYPE NEW PASSWORD] Please re-enter new password: [TYPE NEW PASSWORD] Connecting to the password server. Password change successful. Changes will take up to 5 minutes to propagate to the rest of the HPCx system. /usr/bin/passwd complete. After this you will be logged out. As it says: it now has to change your password on every node in the system, which can take up to 5 minutes. So don't try to log in until 5 minutes have passed. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- SUPERCOMPUTING RESOURCES ACROSS EUROPE AVAILABLE TO UK RESEARCHERS The DEISA project is a consortium of major national HPC centres which operates an integrated infrastructure over eleven existing national high-end platforms across Europe. HPCx has recently joined the DEISA supercomputing Grid. DEISA (Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications) is funded by the EU and has access to a large amount of CPU time on these systems - on HPCx, for example, 5% of the total time is reserved for this. All this time is available for researchers to use. You can apply for this time under the DEISA Extreme Computing Initiative (DECI). Under the first call for proposals, projects were accepted with individual CPU requirements of up to several hundreds of thousands of CPU hours. The deadline for the second call is July 15th 2006. We feel that this could be a major benefit for researchers in the UK, and we would like to encourage you to take advantage of this opportunity. For details on how to apply see http://www.deisa.eu/applications/. If you would like help or advice in preparing your proposal, please feel free to contact the HPCx Support Team .