CSAR Bulletin issued in July 2003

Capability Incentives

Discounts for capability jobs are available on all CSAR systems with immediate effect.

This has been agreed with the Research Councils to encourage capability usage of the national supercomputers for greater scientific achievement.

Please see the Capability Incentive page for details of the discounts and sizes of jobs that qualify. For example, a 384 processor job on green gets a 15% discount.

Changes in usage patterns will be monitored and, subject to reviews, CfS reserve the right to change the incentives at any future date.

Altix Update

As previously announced, a 256-cpu SGI Altix system will be available to CSAR users from 1 October 2003. The Altix will have 1.5GB RAM per processor which is greater than any of the current CSAR or HPCX systems.

As part of the porting program a smaller, 32-cpu SGI Altix system has been installed at Manchester, and work has started on porting a number of codes. A project team has been established to ensure that key codes are ported early.

If you would like your code to be ported and optimised early (free of charge) please contact the helpdesk.

The Altix has been awarded Product of the Year by editors of Linux Journal. In an extensive array of industry-standard benchmarks such as SPEC(r), STREAM Triad and Linpack, as well as on real-world scientific and engineering applications, the SGI Altix 3000 family beat similarly configured systems from IBM, HP and Sun - in some cases delivering more than twice the performance over the nearest competitor.

MRCCS/NSF Summer School: High Performnce Computing in Finite Element Analysis

The Manchester Research Centre for Computational Science (MRCCS) in conjunction with the National Science Foundation (NSF) of the USA are jointly organising a one-week Summer School on High Performance Computing in Finite Element Analysis. It will be held from 1st September to 5th September 2003 at the University of Manchester.

The invited speakers are from Japan, France and Germany, as well as from the UK and the USA. The format of the Summer School will be a mixture of lectures and practical sessions and will also include demonstrations in the virtual reality laboratory.

Further information and details of how to apply are available from http://www.mrccs.man.ac.uk/summer_school/2003