New local HPC system, 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 Niels Henrik Abel" (if your name is Niels Henrik Abel). The newsletter will be issued at least twice a year.
News and announcements
First of all, happy new year! While 2021 has seen a somewhat stumbling start we're convinced it will prove to be better than 2020. As a start, we are very happy to announce the name of the new local HPC cluster (Fox) and even more happy to very soon be able to let in users. Note also the call for pilot users to try out the new cluster. And of course, the deadline for next Sigma2 allocation period is coming up. Read more about these and other topics below.
Introducing Fox
We're very excited to introduce our new HPC cluster Fox! It may not be the largest cluster in the world, but it will cover what was provided by the UiO part of the old Abel cluster and more, and it will mark an important step towards our planned new local research infrastructure for computation at UiO.
Fox will consist of login nodes, regular compute nodes, compute nodes with GPUs, and a couple of machines for interactive use.
Fox will have about 3000 cores on 24 regular compute nodes, each with 128 cores (AMD) and 512 GiB of memory, 3+ TiB NVMe scratch disk and InfiniBand interconnect.
There will be 4 login nodes, with the same specs as the regular compute nodes.
The interactive lineup will have about 500+ cores in 4 nodes each with 128 cores (same as cluster), 1024 GiB of memory, 7.5 TiB NVMe scratch disk and InfiniBand interconnect.
The GPU accelerated part is made up of today's nodes and new NVIDIA A100 based nodes. Today we have 5 nodes with NVIDIA RTX 2080 and with Fox we'll add three new nodes with 4 NVIDIA A100 cards each.
This infrastructure is aimed at and available to all UiO users and it will be set up within the upcoming Educloud infrastructure (formerly known as Forskerplattformen). Fox is the first computing resource to run within Educloud, and we're aiming at moving the remaining research resources when we see that Fox works well with Educloud.
We aim for a very simple self service sign up with minimal admin around usage. The plan is to have no quotas for UiO users. Users with computational needs exceeding the capacity offered by this infrastructure will be assisted in moving their workloads to the national infrastructure at Sigma2. The local setup is intended for relatively small but persistent computing needs, and to make sure that any required transition to the national infrastructure will be as smooth as possible, we will aim at having a software environment and batch system closely following the national infrastructure.
Call for Fox pilot users
While the working situation with COVID-19 has caused some delays in setting up Fox, we are now ready to ask for a limited number of pilot users to come and test our current setup. The actual pilot period is likely to start in mid-February, and we're looking for experienced HPC users representing the broad range of research areas likely to utilize Fox on a regular basis. If you're interested, please contact us at hpc-drift@usit.uio.no describing which application(s) you want to test and we'll get you started as soon as Fox is capable of running jobs.
New e-Infrastructure allocation period 2021.1, application deadline 22 February 2021
The e-Infrastructure period 2021.1 (01.04.2021 - 30.09.2021) is getting nearer, and the deadline for applications for HPC CPU hours and storage (for both regular and sensitive data), is 22 February.
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
There are no planned HPC courses at the moment at UiO as the training is now centrally coordinated. Please follow the links below to get details about courses.
/english/services/it/research/events/
We do organize onboarding sessions for new HPC users from UiO, if you need one please contact hpc-drift@usit.uio.no.
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.
ML resources getting ready for production
We are moving our experimental machine learning infrastructure setup to a production system. This includes providing RHEL 8 as the operating system and EasyBuild module system to provision software. We have set up shared home directories on ml3, ml6 and ml7. Other machines will be added gradually, once Fox is operational.
The machines ml7.hpc.uio.no and ml6.hpc.uio.no are reserved for an IFI, MN course in February. Please use the alternatives listed in the link below during this time.
/tjenester/it/forskning/kompetansehuber/uio-ai-hub-node-project/it-resources/ml-nodes/index.html
Please send any questions or comments to itf-ai-support@usit.uio.no if you want immediate access.
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 at work
