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2023

Going to the HPC-SIG 2023

On Thursday, June 13, I attended the HPC-SIG meeting at the University of Bath which hosted many High Performance Computing (HPC) specialists in the UK. The event was hybrid, so there were international attendees as well as those from the UK.

Pythonic Parallel Processing for HPC: Your Gauss is as good as mine

There are many strategies and tools for improving the performance of Python code, for a comprehensive treatment see High Performance Python by Gorelick and Ozsvald (institutional access is available to QM staff). However, there are some subtleties when using them in an HPC environment. More bluntly, requesting processor cores does not automatically mean your code will use them effectively, and that cannot happen if it doesn't know how many of them there are!

Intel Inspector 2022.2 on Apocrita

As the complexity of HPC applications increases, the management of memory and threading scopes becomes increasingly important. Tools like Intel Inspector are crucial in this context, to effectively identify and resolve a wide array of memory errors and thread synchronisation issues.

Creating and Using Private Modules

Modules are the centralised method of accessing different software on an HPC cluster. By using a variety of modules you can quickly and easily access different versions of applications and create work flows that suit particular projects. The modules offered on Apocrita cover a wide range of applications but there will always be situations that require something unusual or a relatively niche version of a piece of software.