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Introduction to HPC using GPUs July 11, 2013

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 12:51:01 -0700

Registration is open for a one-day class "Introduction to High Performance Computing using GPUs" on July 11, 2013. The class is being held on the University of California Berkeley campus in Sutardja Dai Hall room 250 and will be broadcast to remote viewers.

For more information and to register (both local and remote attendees), please visit

https://www.nersc.gov/users/training/nersc-training-events/intro-gpus/

The class is open to NERSC users; Berkeley Lab and UC-Berkeley students, faculty, and staff; and users of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF). There is no fee. In-person registration is limited to 40.

In addition, NERSC users are welcome to register for the following events sponsored by OLCF:

Open ACC Tutorials July 15-18, 2013: https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/training-event/openacc-tutorials/
Processing and Analysis of Very Large Data Sets, August 6-8, 2013: https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/training-event/processing-and-analysis-of-very-large-data-sets/

Edison Down for About One Month Starting June 24

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 11:23:27 -0700

The Edison Phase II system arrives at NERSC in June, and will boost the Phase I core count by more than a factor of 10. In order to integrate the new components and upgrade existing ones, the entire Edison system will be unavailable for about one month beginning June 24. This includes the login nodes and the scratch file system. Please plan your work accordingly.

While we do not expect to have to delete data on the scratch file system during the conversion, we strongly recommend that you save data you want to preserve to HPSS or elsewhere to guard against unforeseen developments. There is no guarantee your data will be available when Edison returns.

Further details of the Phase II system will be announced later.

Users May Now Clear Their Own Login Failures

Thu, 16 May 2013 11:27:57 -0700

Users may now clear their own login failures simply by logging in to the NIM website (https://nim.nersc.gov). No further steps are necessary; that is, the simple act of logging in to NIM will clear your login failures on all NERSC compute systems. NIM will then provide a display of the number of login failures that were cleared on each compute system that was affected at the top of the NIM landing page.

If you type an incorrect password five consecutive times while trying to login to a NERSC compute system, your account on that system will become "locked", and you will be unable to login to that system until the login failures are cleared. Note that a new password is not needed in this situation. If you can log into the NIM website, then you know that you have the correct password. However, if you do not know your password, you can reset it from the "Reset your NIM password" link on the NIM sign-in page or you can call NERSC Operations at any time, 24 x 7, and somebody will be available to provide you with a temporary password.

2014 INCITE Call for Proposals - Due June 28

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 16:43:56 -0700

The 2014 INCITE Call for Proposals is now open. Open to researchers from academia, government labs, and industry, the INCITE Program is the major means by which the scientific community gains access to the Leadership Computing Facilities' resources. INCITE is currently soliciting proposals for research on the 27-petaflops Cray XK7 “Titan” and the 10-petaflops IBM Blue Gene/Q “Mira” beginning CY2014. Projects for CY2014 are expected to range in size from tens to hundreds of millions of core-hours.

Proposals are due 11:59 p.m. EDT June 28, 2013. For more information see https://proposals.doeleadershipcomputing.org/allocations/calls/incite2014.

HPC Seminar Broadcast May 2: The Materials Project

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 13:49:57 -0700

The Materials Project: Combining Density Dunctional Theory Calculations with Supercomputing Centers for New Materials Discovery

Thursday, May 2, 12:00 PDT

NERSC OSF Room 238

Web broadcast available

Anubhav Jain
Berkeley Lab

New materials can potentially reduce the cost and improve the efficiency of solar photovoltaics, batteries, and catalysts, leading to broad societal impact. This talk describes a computational approach to materials design in which density functional theory (DFT) calculations are performed over very large computing resources. Because DFT calculations accurately predict many properties of new materials, this approach can screen tens of thousands of potential materials in short time frames.

We present some major software development efforts that generated over 10 million CPU-hours worth of materials information in the span of a few months using NERSC clusters. For the effort, we designed a custom workflow software using Python and MongoDB. This represents one of the largest materials data sets ever computed, and the results are compiled on a public web site (The Materials Project) with over 3,000 registered users that are designing new materials with computed information.

Finally, we describe future efforts in which algorithms might "self-learn" which chemical spaces are the most promising for investigation based on the results of previous computations, with application to solar water splitting materials.

Track NERSC Outages in Google Calendar

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 07:56:10 -0700

Outages are now available in Google calendar form. You can subscribe to this calendar by following the link, http://goo.gl/A4n3k, and then clicking the add button on the bottom right. If you find any issues with the calendar content, please contact NERSC consultants by email at consult(at)nersc.gov.

HPSS Outage Tue Mar 19 - Fri Mar 22

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 09:43:17 -0700

The NERSC HPSS "User" system (archive.nersc.gov) will be down for four days from Tue Mar 19 07:00 to Fri Mar 22 17:00). The system will be upgraded from HPSS version 6.2 to version 7.3.

This new version of the HPSS server software is not compatible with current GridFTP servers. This means the NERSC HPSS systems will not support any grid-based transfer methods (including GlobusOnline) following the upgrade. We expect to install a fix for this problem during a scheduled downtime by the end of April.

This is a major upgrade that will require users of the HPSS User system to switch to new versions of the HPSS client software tools hsi and htar. Note that if you use a "regular" ftp client, your current client will work with the new version of the HPSS server software.

If you access the User system with hsi and/or htar on NERSC-supported computational systems (Hopper, Carver, Genepool, etc), new versions of the clients will be installed during the outage. No action is required by users.

However, if you run hsi and/or htar on a non-NERSC system, you will need to acquire new clients. New clients will be available on Thursday, March 21, at 08:00 on this webpage:

https://www.nersc.gov/users/data-and-networking/hpss/storing-and-retrieving-data/software-downloads/

PLEASE DO NOT DOWNLOAD NEW CLIENTS BEFORE THU MAR 21 08:00!

All users now enabled on the new Cray XC30, Edison Phase I

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 09:36:47 -0800

All user accounts have been enabled on the first phase of Edison, NERSC’s newest HPC resource, a Cray XC30. The system was installed last December and is currently in the pre-production phase, a time when NERSC users are given access to the machine, and also when NERSC and Cray staff are still making improvements to the system. Users are invited to run jobs on the Edison Phase I system free of charge in exchange for providing feedback to NERSC staff about their experiences using Edison.

The Edison Phase I system has 664 compute nodes and 10,624 cores. Each node has two eight-core Intel “Sandy Bridge” processors running at 2.6 GHz (16 cores per node), and has 64 GB of memory. While the user environment on Edison is remarkably similar to that on Hopper, a number of new features and technologies are available on the Edison Phase I system, including the Cray Aries high speed interconnect, Hyper-Threading technology, the Sonexion storage system, and an external batch server.

More information about Edison can be found at:
http://www.nersc.gov/users/computational-systems/edison/

Webcam for New NERSC Building

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 17:01:03 -0800

NERSC plans to move into a new building called the Computational Research and Theory Facility by early 2015. Construction has begun at the main Berkeley Lab site. A webcam shows construction activity.

NUG Monthly Teleconference and Webinar March 7, 11:00 PST

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 09:45:10 -0800

All users are invited and encouraged to participate in the monthly NERSC Users Group teleconference & webinar. Details.

NERSC User Day February 13 - Trends, Discovery, and Innovation in HPC

Sun, 10 Feb 2013 18:30:08 -0800

All members of the Berkeley Lab community, as well as those who have registered for the NERSC Users Group meeting, are welcome to join us for the NERSC User Day this February 13, 2013, in the Building 50 auditorium at Berkeley Lab.

The theme of the User Day is Trends, Discovery, and Innovation in High Performance Computing:

Trends

9:00 – The Future of High Performance Scientific Computing, Kathy Yelick, Berkeley Lab Associate Director of Computing Science

9:45 – NERSC Today and in the Next 10 Years, Sudip Dosanjh, NERSC Director

Discovery

11:00 – Discovery of the Higgs Boson and the role of LBNL and World-Wide Computing, Ian Hinchliffe, Berkeley Lab

11:30 – Discovery of the Θ₁₃Weak Mixing Angle at Daya Bay Using NERSC and ESnet, Craig Tull, Berkeley Lab

Innovation

1:30 – The Materials Project: Combining density functional theory calculations with supercomputing centers for new materials discovery, Anubhav Jain, Berkeley Lab

2:00 - Python in a Parallel Environment, David Grote, Berkeley Lab

2:30 - OpenMSI: A Mass Spectroscopy Imaging Science Gateway, Ben Bowen, Berkeley Lab

3:15 - Towards an ALS Data Pipeline and Analysis Framework at NERSC, Jack Deslippe & Craig Tull, Berkeley Lab

3:45 - Large Sparse Matrix Problems in Ab-initio Nuclear Structure Calculations, Pieter Maris, Iowa State University

4:15 - iPython Notebook, Fernando Perez, UC Berkeley

See NERSC User Group 2013 Annual Meeting.

ASCR Leadership Computing Challenge (ALCC) proposals due February 1, 2013

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 13:15:13 -0800

DOE's ASCR Leadership Computing Challenge (ALCC) program is intended for special situations of interest to the Department's energy mission, with an emphasis on high-risk, high-payoff simulations:

Advancing the clean energy agenda.
Advancing a robust predictive understanding of the Earth’s climate and environmental systems.
Responding to natural and man-made disasters or incidents; e.g., hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, pandemics.
Broadening the community of researchers capable of using leadership computing resources
Exploration of new frontiers in physical, biological, and computational sciences.

Proposals are due February 1, 2013. See:
http://science.energy.gov/ascr/facilities/alcc/.

Call for presentations and registration is open for NUG 2013.

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 11:55:57 -0800

Registration is open for NUG 2013, the annual meeting of the NERSC User Group. We've also issued a call for contributed presentations at NUG 2013. [MORE]

Please take the 2012 NERSC Usr Survey (now closed)

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 14:54:00 -0800

Please take a few minutes to fill out NERSC's annual user survey. Your feedback is important because it allows us to judge the quality of our services, give DOE information on how we are doing, and point us to areas in which we can improve.

The survey is on the web at the URL:

https://www.nersc.gov/news-publications/publications-reports/user-surveys/2012/

The survey, which covers calendar year 2012, is open through January 31, 2013.

Nominations Open for 2013 NERSC HPC Achievement Awards

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 09:24:46 -0800

Nominations are open for the 2013 NERSC Award for Innovative Use of High Performance Computing and the 2013 NERSC Award for High Impact Scientific Achievement. These are the first of what are planned to be annual awards. Current NERSC Principal Investigators, Project Managers, and PI Proxies may nominate any NERSC user or collaboratory group. The deadline for nominations is Thursday, Jan. 31, 2013. [MORE]

NERSC Allocation Year 2012 Ends Monday, January 7

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 11:30:00 -0800

NERSC's Allocation Year 2012 (AY12) will end on Monday, January 7, 2013; AY13 will begin on Tuesday, January 8, 2013. Complete information about this event may be found here.

NERSC 2013 awards

Fri, 14 Dec 2012 12:56:18 -0800

The NERSC 2013 awards have been posted.

Phase-1 of NERSC's Cray Edison System Has Arrived

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 10:10:45 -0800

Phase-1 of the new Edison system, a Cray XC30 (Cascade), arrived at NERSC on November 27. The system will be available to users in 2013; early user access is targeted for February. See Edison Overview.

Applications for Postdoctoral Fellowship in Computational Science at Berkeley Lab due November 26

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 16:51:14 -0700

Researchers in computer science, applied mathematics or any computational science discipline who have received their Ph.D. within the last three years are encouraged to apply for the Luis W. Alvarez Postdoctoral Fellowship in Computational Science at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Applications are due November 26, 2012 for Fall 2013.

Learn more at http://www.lbl.gov/alvarez.fellowship.

New NERSC Director Sudip Dosanjh

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 14:13:17 -0700

New NERSC Director Sudip Dosanjh started October 4. He extends his greetings to all NERSC users and is looking forward to meeting you at the NUG teleconferences, requirements workshops, and other scientific meetings.

See https://www.nersc.gov/news-publications/news/nersc-center-news/2012/sandia-s-sudip-dosanjh-named-new-nersc-director/