News

The latest news regarding CSAR and the wider HPC community is provided here. Additional information, particularly on new developments and other events associated with the service, is also provided to users in the form of a monthly email bulletin.

New consortium aims to give the UK a world lead in research using High Performance Computing

The largest ever consortium to support UK academic research using high performance computers (HPC) is being established by the University of Edinburgh, the University of Manchester and the CCLRC Daresbury Laboratory.

Please see the joint press release, or the HPC-UK website for more details.

Improvements to Newton

Work was completed on Friday 29th July 2005 to reconfigure Newton as a 512 NUMA machine (i.e. the fast interconnect is now across the whole machine). At the same time, it was moved to a 512 SSI (single system image), rather than the previous two partitions, newtd and newt64i.

As well as simplifying the system, jobs can now use up to a maximum of 496 processors (16 processors are reserved for interactive use and the operating system) although jobs over 358 processors will only run by special request to csar-advice@cfs.ac.uk

During core hours, the development queue will take up 16 of these processors. Users will still be able to submit jobs to the newt15 queue as at present (using the -q newt15 option to bsub) in order to run a job on the 1.5GHz processors. No job will run across both 1.3 GHz and 1.5GHz processors unless it is too large to be run without doing so.

Application Deadline Now Passed

Participating Research Councils no longer accept grant proposals requesting time on the CSAR facility (as of 30th June 2005). All grant proposals currently in the system on or before 30th June 2005 were treated in the normal way. NERC will continue its present practice of periodic allocation of resources for its consortia.

Provision will be made for all grants with outstanding HEC time on the CSAR service after the 30th June 2006 (when the CSAR contract ends). A number of options are currently being considered on how to provide this provision. Further details will be provided once known.