CSAR Bulletin issued in July 2002

Temporary Areas

Further to the information provided in the last CSAR Bulletin regarding the installation of new facilities, please note that with regards to temporary space zero retention is still the policy. Important data should be kept in your home or hold directories.

Storage Area Network (SAN): Current Status

Please see the bulletin for June for further details about the new facilities being provided via the SAN. All of the hardware is now in place and is being configured and tested. CSAR staff have already had their home directories moved to the SAN and have accounts on the new Origin 300, Wren. We are currently testing these new facilities. Once this has been completed satisfactorily, user home directories will be moved to the SAN and accounts will be set up on Wren for all current Fermat users.

Existing Fermat users will not have to self-register on Wren, however, it will be necessary for PI's to trade resources in order to use Wren. The transfer of user home directories will be staggered over a period of up to four weeks, with at least one week's notice. The transfer should be transparent except that access to Fermat, Green and Wren will not be possible during the transfer - this could require one day, but may be much shorter. A proposed schedule for these transfers will be made available shortly.

Load Sharing Facility (LSF): Current Status

LSF has been installed on Wren and is undergoing testing, both from CSAR staff and selected users. A script has been developed to assist in converting NQE commands/options to LSF. Further details of the implementation process of both the SAN and LSF will shortly be available via the CSAR web pages.

Gaussian 98

The new version of Gaussian 98 (Rev.A.11.3) has now been installed on Fermat and Green. For further details please see Gaussian webpage.

SSH on Turing

ssh on Turing will be upgraded to version 3.0 on Tuesday 3rd September.

MPT 1.6 on Fermat and Green

The latest version of the Message Passing Toolkit, mpt.1.6, is available on Green and Fermat. To switch to use this module, use the command

module swap mpt mpt.1.6

(You will have to source the relevant module script for your shell first, please see Modules Webpage)

This module includes enhanced OpenMP and MPI interoperability and decreased MPI start-up times for over 128 processor jobs, plus several other features. All the new features in this module are detailed in the release notes, which can be viewed by typing

grelnotes -rpath /opt/mpt/1.6/usr/relnotes/

New System Defaults for MPT, SCSL and compilers

On Monday August 12th, the new default modules on Fermat and Green will become

• mpt.1.5.3.0
• scsl.1.4.0.1
• MIPSpro.7.3.1.3

There are several significant changes to the currently installed modules. Brief comments are given below.

Message Passing Toolkit version 1.5.3.0 (mpt.1.5.3.0):

Enhanced Single Copy Mode: Single copy send/receive mode enhanced for processes residing on the same host. Previously this feature was enabled only for data residing in the symmetric heap. To enable, set the MPI_BUFFER_MAX environment variable to the size of minimum. For more information please see man MPI_BUFFER_MAX

MPI_Alloc_mem and MPI_Free_mem Functionality: You can now use MPI-2 functions to allocate dynamic memory. The Fortran bindings for this will work only with -64 applications.

MPI_Transfer_of_handles Functions: These functions convert a fortran integer to the appropriate C handle and vice-versa. Please see the release notes for the list of routines.

For further information on the additional features that were released with this version please see:

grelnotes -rpath /opt/mpt/1.5.3.0/usr/relnotes mpt

Please note that by MPT 1.6 SGI plan to remove PVM from the MPT bundle. It will however, be supported on a courtesy basis and as part of a separate bundle. There will be no future PVM bug fixes.

SGI-Cray Scientific Library Version 1.4.0.1 (scsl.1.4.0.1):

Scsl.1.4.0.1 includes the following additional features

• An iterative solver for sparse systems of linear equations.
• A direct sparse solver for complex systems of linear equations.
• An in-place solve option for the direct sparse solvers.
• A thread-safe, parallel random number generator.
• A parallel implementation of the solve phase for the out-of-core sparse solver.
• Fortran 90 interface to the BLAS, FFT's and sparse solvers.

MIPSpro Fortran and C/C++ Compilers Version 7.3.1.2:

There are many new flags and options for the F90/77 and C/C++ compilers and the features are too extensive to list in this bulletin. To view the release notes type

grelnotes -rpath /opt/MIPSpro/7313/usr/relnotes/

then select the desired option from the Product menu.