Websites can be very useful for HPC to allow easier access. Recently we had an issue with a website we use and learned a few things on the way. Know your users A website has been running fine for a number of months – and building up a user base. However we recently hit an Read more
Modules are used on many supercomputers since it allows multiple versions of software to be easily chosen to be loaded into a users environment. We would now like to show how modules work on our supercomputer since we apply some tricks to try and make maintaining them easier and make them “rock” even more. What Read more
I am not sure whether Bugs Bunny was refering to documentation but we shall assume it does for this post. Documentation can be a dreaded or loved term which may require a carrot or stick approach to get it done, but the method to create and manage documentation can have an impact on whether documentation Read more
Limits on runtimes Running jobs on a supercomputer can sometimes involve letting the job run for a long time. A long time in this instance is longer than the default expected maximum runtime for a particular type of job. At Cardiff we have 2 types of jobs which we have setup our supercomputer for. Serial Read more
The recent announcement, see BBC article, by LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) of the observation of gravitational waves by their detectors in September 2015 has been described as one of the biggest scientific discoveries in years. LIGO involves a consortium of scientists from around the world, including the group of researchers at Cardiff University. This Read more
It has been a long summer and it is time again to create a little post for a recent encounter on our supercomputer. Errors in Perl Perl is a common language which is very common within the Genomic communnity. Recently we had an interesting Perl issue where a job would just run for its maximum Read more
Recently we have implements an automatic job summary which is printed at the end of a user’s job that run on our supercomputer at Cardiff University. These job summaries are to help the user understand what impact the job has had and how to improve future jobs – just like energy efficiency ratings. This post Read more
Using accelerators such as GPUs and Intel Phi technologies are becoming a popular method to extend the performance of certains codes. ARCCA is holding a research seminar which covers this topic. All are welcome to attend, even if you are not planning to use the technologies its is great to see the cutting-edge research Cardiff Read more
Just like an iceberg, floating point numbers can have hidden danger lurking just under the surface. A recent email through a mailing list reminded me about the subtlties of handling floating point numbers. Floating point numbers are represented by mantissa*(base**exponent), see floating point numbers. There are many occassions where programmers may forget that floating point Read more
A researcher has recently been trying to get to grips with meshes where they have scanned in some materials and would like to model this within COMSOL (multi-physics modelling package). There are a range of software which can be used to manipulate and display meshes. After some searching we found Gmsh seems to be very Read more
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