Exhibitor Engagements

This will get expanded on with more comments and images. Due to the sheer size of the exhibitor hall it is only possible to scratch the surface without several people and coordination. Lenovo: discussed the cloud platform from Nimba (cloud in Dallas but also can use on-premise and multi-cloud) and purchases of kit. Atos: brief …

Better Education for Sysadmins

https://slides.app.goo.gl/JwW8d Talks Nicholas Thorne, TACC Teach HPC software stack. Small groups or individuals Hardware – hard to find such a resource for teaching system admins. Don’t change tool stacks too often Planning for scale Parallel file systems important, but hard to get training resources. Training is viewed as good Bryan Johnston, South Africa Use older …

The Role of Cyberinfrastructure in Science: Challenges and Opportunities

Important to deliver science, especially (now) workflow management. The use of Open Science Grid (USA) for work was noted. ‘CI Practitoner’ where CI is cyberinfrastructure. Science Gateways Community Institute – interfaces to allow people to use systems easily and effectively. Data is extremely important – collection, curation, metadata, availability, fusing data from many sources, etc. …

Solar Collisons at the limit of HPC

Visualisation of results, not during. Spatial and temporal discretisation of complex equations -> errors Chemistry of dust: hard to do (q.v. Sheffield) 300,000 Blue Waters (NCSA) Not all simulations scale (gravity) Simulations on different scales. Simulations of binary stars and their ultimate end. Nebula formation. Takes a long time (6 months wall clock) due to …

Cloud Scheduling

Resource Aware Scheduling Compact and Exclusive: common in SLURM, SGE, etc. Self-contention, resource under-utlisation are issues. (C-n-E is for example, SLURM node-exclusive). Propose: spread and share model. E.g. share nodes where the resource usages allow them to do that and vice-versa. LLC issues – spreading means fewer issues with cache usage. Cache allocation technology – …

Exchanging Best Practices in Supporting Computational and Data-Intensive Research

Who are the people that do this? Research software engineers, Research facilitators Experts (compute platform providers?) Panel: USA centric, so it will be interesting to see how this is different to the position in the UK in terms of the panel’s views. Panel Presentations Bob Sinkovits, XSEDE Mission statement includes: Optimisation. Visualisation. Workflows. Using accelerators. …

Keynote

These notes are fragmentary but I will rework them. First, various awards  Main speaker:  Discussions of the rovers on Mars Discussion of the composition of Mars. Robots sent to Mars Software for driving not written before launch Parachute.. Lander too heavy. Parachute redesign. Airbags used as terminal velocity still 200kmh. Hard to design such that …