For much of the year we have been working on a major project to upgrade Apocrita to a new operating system, (Rocky Linux 9, hereafter known as Rocky 9). As part of the project, we have deployed a new package building tool to help us recompile all of the research applications to work on the new system.
The majority of the cluster has now been upgraded to Rocky 9. The remaining CentOS 7 nodes will be updated in due course.
2024 has been productive year in the outreach and education of HPC to different schools at Queen Mary University of London. We have formed alliances with different managers and PIs from various schools within the University who understand the value that HPC can add to their scientific research. We are pleased to share our latest event in 2024:
If you go to run every morning, or drive to work on weekdays, you should know that every journey is unique. For me, every High Performance Computing (HPC) workshop I deliver has its own personality. The audience, the material tailored to each audience, the interactions and questions, and of course, the energy of the community. Last Thursday September 26, an HPC workshop for the Wolfson Institute of Population Health was held from 2:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. The seminar includes, as usual, presentations, coffee break, quiz and treats, and the photographs to make it memorable.
The Apocrita highmem nodes have just been upgraded so that they contain newer
CPUs with more modern instruction sets.
On August the 9th, the High Performance Computing for the School of Engineering and Material Science workshop was held at the Sofa Room at Dept. W. Around 16 researchers who already use Apocrita attended the event. The event covered six topics: Linux commands for Apocrita, HPC clusters at QMUL, Launching HPC jobs, Applications for SEMS, Using GPUs, and Miscellaneous.
On May 3, 2024 Queen Mary University of London conducted a workshop to introduce our students to Linux at the Department W building in Whitechapel. Students from a variety of programmes at Queen Mary attended the workshop. Many students who participated are working towards Masters and PhD degrees.
The High Performance Computing (HPC) team organised an event to celebrate February's bonus day this year. The goal was to introduce the HPC team members to the research community at QMUL, and to have the opportunity to ask the HPC expert in-person about any issue related to the performance of HPC jobs in Apocrita.
Here is a quick summary of what we covered in the session:
We held a 2-hour HPC workshop last Friday, December 15th. We arranged an agenda in coordination with the research student at QMUL, Peter Alexander Lock. It covered the generalities of Linux, accessing Apocrita, submitting jobs, and HPC commands.
Since the last module update in December 2022, we have:
On November 15th, our HPC team organised an event called “Let’s talk about Linux and HPC”, which focused on giving an overview of HPC at QMUL. The conference was open to the public and published on Eventbrite.
Approximately 30 people were in attendance between organisers and online or onsite attendees that came to our 2-hour event in the Engineering building at the Mile End campus. During the conference, attendees shared opinions, thoughts and suggestions for future workshops dealing with Linux, Ubuntu and setting up scripts in more detail. They were able to express themselves with the help of mentimeter.