High Performance Computing for SEMS

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.

Format of the event

This was a three-hour event during which we used a novel approach to aid in educating the participants. There were six quiz-rounds of anonymous knowledge assessments followed by a presentation and an explanation on each topic. Almost 90 questions were asked during the workshop. We used Mentimeter for this purpose, and the attendees all chose nicknames to use during the session. Because I had real time feedback from Mentimeter, I was better able to focus my presentation on the areas in which the participants needed the most improvement.

I was very pleased to see the positive attitudes and cheerful dispositions of the participants throughout the event. The two participants who scored highest on the anonymous assessments were awarded Apocrita t-shirts. Congratulations to BadRobot and Earthman. We were all delighted and surprised to learn Earthman was indeed a female!

Coffee Break

The coffee break gave us all an opportunity to become better acquainted with each other. It also afforded us the opportunity to talk and exchange ideas about how to introduce new post-graduate researchers into Apocrita. I encouraged them to visit our official online documentation HPC@QMUL, developed by the ITSR team.

I would like to thank the Principal Investigator Dr. Eldad Avital for attending the event, and for showing his support to the HPC training sessions at QMUL. The researcher Peter Lock was so helpful during the session, and I am thankful for his commitment to the HPC community initiative. Finally, I am very thankful to the ITSR team leaders Simon Butcher and Thomas King for their continuous support.