CSAR Bulletin issued in February 2005

Technical Symposium On Reconfigurable Computing with FPGAs

The University of Manchester invites the scientific research community to participate in a technical symposium on reconfigurable computing with FPGAs, to be held 21-22 February in the Michael Smith Building at the University of Manchester.

As an exciting new area of research, this event gives attendees the opportunity to interact with other scientists interested in exploring the possibilities of using reconfigurable computing to accelerate their software applications through the exchange of ideas and experiences.

Co-sponsored by Cray and SGI, the symposium is free of charge and will be conducted in English. The event will feature speakers from Europe and the U.S. who will share their early experiences with this new platform as well as provide attendees the opportunity to talk with technical experts from manufacturers and vendors as well as researchers in the field about their experiences with using FPGAs to meet high application performance goals.

The preliminary speaker list includes representatives from Xilinx, NASA, Ohio Supercomputer Center, Star Bridge Systems, Celoxica as well as senior technical officials from our sponsors.

Registration for the free, limited-attendance event is available online at http://www.csar.cfs.ac.uk/fpga, by email to Kevin.Roy@manchester.ac.uk or by phoning Kevin Roy at 44-161-275-7031.

The 'newt15' Queue

We would like to remind users of the newt15 queue on Newton. This queue accesses the 128 1.5 GHz processors, the remaining processors are 1.3 GHz. These faster processors also have twice as much Level 3 cache at 6 MBytes. They can be accessed by adding the following line to your batch script: #BSUB -q newt15. The usage of these processors is charged at 10% above the 1.3 GHz processor rate. However, applications run to date have seen speed ups greater than 10%. Also, the queue is often quiet and the use of it can be a means of getting your job to start sooner.

New Course Timetable

We have published the list of courses that will be running between February and April. The following courses are running:

• Introduction to HPC and The CSAR Service (11 Feb)
• Fortran 90 (28th Feb - 2nd Mar)
• Introduction to MPI (21st Mar)
• Advanced MPI (22nd Mar)
• MPI One Sided Communication and MPI-IO (23rd Mar)
• Shared Memory Parallelisation with OpenMP (4th Apr)
• Itanium 2 and Parallel Scaling for the SGI Altix 3700 (7th - 8th Apr)
• Origin 3000 Optimisation and Parallel Scaling (19th - 20th Apr)
• Performance and Development Tools (29th Apr)

Please visit the following page for further details http://www.csar.cfs.ac.uk/services/courses/. To book your place on any of the above courses please contact csar-advice@cfs.ac.uk