News on HPC systems @ UiO, application deadline for CPU time through Sigma2, interesting conferences and external courses.
- USIT Underavdeling for IT i forskning ITF(NO), or Division for research computing (RC,EN), is responsible for delivering IT support for research at University of Oslo.
- The division's departments operate infrastructure for research, and support researchers in the use of computational resources, data storage, application portals, parallelization and optimizing of code, and advanced user support.
- Announcement of this newsletter is done on the hpc-users mailing list. To join hpc-users list, send a mail to sympa@usit.uio.no with subject "subscribe hpc-users Mr Fox" (if your name is Mr Fox). The newsletter will be issued at least twice a year.
News and announcements
First of all, hope you all have had a nice summer! During the spring, we have been working hard to get several of our services into production state; we have a new supercomputer in production, the ML nodes now have a shared filesystem and we've put into production a new introductory Lightweight HPC service. In fact we're so proud by what we've set up that we've decided to widen the audience for this particular newsletter to include all of the IT staff at UiO.
So if you receive this newsletter for the first time and you know any users who might require more computing power than can be comfortably provided by their laptop, please don't hesitate to forward this newsletter to them. And if you want to get more HPC news from UiO twice a year, please do subscribe to the hpc-users@usit.uio.no mailing list, e.g. by sending a mail to sympa@usit.uio.no with subject "subscribe hpc-users Mr Fox" (if your name is Mr Fox).
Fox Supercomputer available on Educloud Research
UiO aims to offer the best tools and solutions for research and research collaboration, and we can now add another service to the portfolio.
Educloud Research is an UiO-developed IT platform for research services where researchers build their projects with what they need of access for collaborators, storage space, software, computing and other resources as needed.
And now Educloud Research is launched with its first service – UiO's local supercomputer Fox – providing access for researchers to UiO's most powerful HPC cluster. Fox has around 3000 cores distributed over 24 compute nodes, each with 128 cores, 512 GB memory and a lightning fast NVMe internal disk of several terabytes. In addition, Fox has a GPU-accelerated partition with three nodes each containing 4 NVIDIA A100 cards and an interactive part consisting of 4 nodes with 128 cores and 1 terabyte memory. For interconnection and to connect with the shared IBM ESS storage of Educloud, Fox is set up with lightning fast InfiniBand network.
Use of Fox is free (with the exception of extra storage space) for UiO users and will with the Educloud Research platform give new opportunities for collaboration across institutions and countries combined with the data centric model.
More information about the Educloud Research: https://www.uio.no/english/services/it/research/platforms/edu-research/
Foxdocs - Fox User Manual: https://www.uio.no/english/services/it/research/platforms/edu-research/help/hpc/docs/fox/index.md
Educloud Research can be ordered for projects outside UiO (soon): https://www.uio.no/english/services/it/research/platforms/edu-research/order.html
ML nodes in production
MLs are popular and we will assist some of the heavy users to migrate to Fox. We have kept most popular software up to date, send us an mail if we miss anything.
See status of the ML nodes in the link below.
Please send any questions or comments to itf-ai-support@usit.uio.no and applications for access can be submitted here.
Lightweight HPC – Free access to powerful computing servers for UiO users
USIT ITF are happy to announce the new service called lightweight HPC – A
service with close to no entry level, free for all and interactive. This service
is for users who have needs that are too small to involve any kind of project
management but just need to run some computations on a powerful server.
You can think of it as en extension of your desktop, calculator or laptop. As
this little farm of compute nodes has been set up with varying architectures
and capabilities, it also serves a testing ground for new/experimental technology.
All systems in the lightweight-HPC farm share a common $HOME mounted
on the UiO IBM-ESS storage, meaning that you'll find your files on all the
systems under this service. As the systems are interactive you might find that
some nodes are more loaded than others, so as with all free seating situations
you might have to look for a less loaded one.
Users who overuse the system will face themselves in the happy situation as being
candidates for migration to larger HPC systems, like the Fox in the Educloud, the
national Sigma2 systems or even the world class systems like the Pre-exascale
system LUMI where Norway/Sigma2 participate.
The system freebio.hpc hold a selection of bio-informatics databases so if you
need something along these lines look for it there (under /work).
More info about the lightweight HPC systems is published on this page:
https://www.uio.no/english/services/it/research/hpc/freebee/index.html
The only requirement to get access to this service is that you have a UiO username, so if you want to check it out, please apply for access through nettskjema.
Confused? Resource guide is coming
We have started working on a guide to the various HPC related services available to UiO users, and we would very much like input from you. What do you think users would need or want to know in order to select the right service for their needs? If you have any thoughts on this, please fill in this form.
New e-Infrastructure allocation period 2021.2, application deadline 15 August 2021
The e-Infrastructure period 2021.2 (01.10.2021 - 31.03.2022) is getting nearer, and the deadline for applications for HPC CPU hours and storage (for both regular and sensitive data), is 15 August. Please note that although applications for allocations can span multiple allocation periods, they require verification from the applicants prior to each application deadline to be processed by the Resource Allocation Committee for a subsequent period.
Kind reminder: If you have many CPU hours remaining in the current period, you should of course try to utilize them asap, but since many users will be doing the same there is likely going to be a resource squeeze and potentially long queue times. The quotas are allocated according to several criteria, of which publications registered to Cristin is an important one (in addition to historical usage). The quotas are based on even use throughout the allocation period. If you think you will be unable to spend all your allocated CPU hours, it is highly appreciated to notify sigma@uninett.no so that the CPU hours may be released for someone else. You may get extra hours if you need more later. For those of you that have run out of hours already, or are about to run out of hours, take a look at https://www.sigma2.no/extra-allocation to see how to ask for more. No guarantees of course.
Run
projects
to list project accounts you are able to use.
Run
cost -p nn0815k
to check your allocation (replace 0815 with your project's account name).
Run
cost -p nn0815k --detail
to check your allocation and print consumption for all users of that allocation.
HPC Course week
We are organizing a joint only training event in October. More details will be available once the logistics are in place.
https://wiki.uib.no/hpcdoc/index.php/HPC_and_NIRD_toolkit_user_course_October_2021
NeIC training calendar
Looking for more training events? NeIC is maintaining a shared calendar for training events in the Nordics, see https://neic.no/training/ for more information.
Availability of other computing resources
If you want to explore ARM based compute systems and also explore next generation Vector/SIMD/SVE units and its impact on your code please come forward as we have a nice set of ARM and Allinea tools to run on our ARM testbed. UiO is working closely with Simula which runs a project looking at novel hardware for exascale. If your interests are along those lines we are happy to introduce you.
Other hardware needs
If you are in need of particular types of hardware (fancy GPUs, kunluns, dragons, Graphcore, etc.) not provided through our local infrastructure, please contact us (hpc-drift@usit.uio.no), and we'll try to help you as best we can, similarly to our ARM collaboration with Simula mentioned above.
Also, if you have a computational challenge where your laptop is too small but a full-blown HPC solution is a bit of an overkill, it might be worth checking out NREC. This service can provide you with your own dedicated server, with a range of operating systems to choose from.
With the ongoing turmoil about computing architectures we are also looking into RISC-V, the European Processor Initiative is aiming for ARM and RISC-V and UiO needs to stay put.
Publication tracker
USIT Department for Research Computing (RC) is interested in keeping track of publications where computation on RC services are involved. We greatly appreciate an email to:
hpc-publications@usit.uio.no
about any publications (including in the general media). If you would like to cite use of our services, please follow this information.
Fox meets Fox
