CSAR Bulletin issued in December 2002

Christmas Hours/Cover

Although the University is closed from 24th December to 2nd January, the CSAR Helpdesk will be available for queries by email only on the following days over the Christmas break - 24th, 27th, 30th and 31st December.

NQE to LSF

LSF is now the preferred queueing method for the SGI systems within the CSAR service. Consequently LSF commands (beginning with the letter 'b' - bsub, bjobs, bkill, etc) will be loaded by default on fermat, green and wren from Tuesday 7th January. NQE commands (beginning with the letter 'q' - qsub, qstat, qdel) will still be available. The qs command will also be modified from that date to provide details of all jobs whether under LSF or NQE.

From that date LSF will be the ONLY batch system available on Green. On Fermat, NQE will remain available for small (less than 4 cpus) jobs for a period. Users are reminded that, currently, LSF jobs on fermat and green are 'rounded up' to multiples of 4 cpus. It is therefore recommended that jobs of less than 4 cpus should be run under NQE on Fermat. Short, single-cpu 'compile' type jobs can also be run under LSF on Wren, using the bcompile command.

It is recommended that users do not specify a destination machine for their job, the system will then run the job on the next available machine.

Job suspension has not yet been implemented, therefore job scheduling will ensure that periodically cpus are made available for the running of any larger jobs on Green.

CSAR User Steering Group Meeting

We are holding a user steering group meeting on Monday 6th January 2003. If you have any issues about any aspect of the CSAR service that you would like raising at the meeting, please email Dr Lois Steenman-Clark (l.steenman-clark@rdg.ac.uk)

Your comments are greatly appreciated.

UKHEC Seminar on Visualization for High End Computing

Thursday 6th February 2003, University of Manchester

As part of the UK High End Computing (UKHEC) collaboration, MRCCS is organising a day of seminars on Visualization for High End Computing. This seminar will focus on the challenges and methodologies of applying visualization to high end computing, including parametric steering, integration with the Grid, applications, etc.

Confirmed speakers are:

• Professor Charles Hansen, University of Utah, USA
• Professor Nick Avis, University of Cardiff
• Professor Ken Brodlie, University of Leeds
• Professor Min Chen, University of Wales Swansea
• Dr Julian Gallop, CRC Rutherford Appleton Laboratoy
• Dr Helen Wright, University of Hull

Provisional speakers are:

• Professor Robert Spence, Imperial College

Places must be booked as seating is limited. This event is free. For details and registration: http://www.ukhec.ac.uk/events/viz2002/

UKHEC Workshop on Parallel Finite Element Analysis

13th and Friday the 14th of March 2003, University of Manchester

This is a 2 day training event that aims primarily to encourage engineers who currently use Finite Element Analysis to exploit parallel methodology so that they can increase the complexity of their problems and start to take advantage of UK academic high-end computing facilities. The timetable is a mixture of lectures, exercises and attendees are encouraged to bring their own code.

Guest Lecturers include:

• Prof Ian Smith, UMIST
• Mr Terry Hewitt, head of CSAR and MVC, University of Manchester
• Dr Mike Pettipher, CSAR, University of Manchester
• Dr Lee Margetts, CSAR/University of Madrid
• Dr Jon Gibson, CSAR, University of Manchester
• Ms Joanna Leng, MVC, University of Manchester

Places are limited so please book. Full details and registration can be obtained from: http://mrccs.man.ac.uk/ukhec_fe_workshop/

User Survey 2002

Thank you to all of you who took part in the User Survey for 2002. William Connolley of BAS was the winner of the prize draw.