ARCHER, the UK's national supercomputing service offers training in software development and high-performance computing to scientists and researchers across the UK.
Details
Persistent memory, such as Intel's Optane DCPMM, is now available for use in systems and will be included in future exascale deployments such as the DoE Aurora system. This new form of memory requires both different programming approaches to exploit the persistent functionality and storage performance and redesign of applications to benefit from the full performance of the hardware.
This online course aims to educate participants on the persistent memory hardware currently available, the software methods to exploit such hardware, and the choices that users of systems and system designers have when deciding what persistent memory functionality and configurations to utilize.
The course will provide hands-on experience on programming persistent memory along with a wealth of information on the hardware and software ecosystem and potential performance and functionality benefits. We will be using an HPC system that has compute nodes with Optane memory for the tutorial practicals.
Trainer
Adrian Jackson
Adrian Jackson is a Research Architect at EPCC, where he works on a range of different research, from investigating new memory hardware and programming models, to optimising and porting parallel codes, and working with application scientists to enable their computational simulation or data analysis. He also teaches on EPCC's MSc in HPC, giving lectures on Programming Skills, HPC Architecture, and Performance Programming.
Format
This online course will run over two sessions on consecutive Wednesday afternoons, each running 14:00 - 16:30 UTC (15:00 - 17:30 CET) with a half-hour break 15:00-15:30 UTC (16:00 - 16:30 CET), starting on Wed 15th January and ending on Wed 22nd January 2020.
We will be using Blackboard Collaborate for the course, which is very simple to use and entirely browser-based.
Collaborate usually works without problems with modern browsers, but Firefox or Chrome is recommended. Links to join each of the sessions will be published on the course materials page.
Attendees will register for the course in the usual way using the registration form.
Computing requirements
All attendees will need their own desktop or laptop with the following software installed:
- web browser - e.g. Firefox or Chrome
- pdf viewer - e.g. Firefox, Adobe Acrobat
and
- ssh client
- on Mac/Linux then Terminal is fine,
- on Windows we recommend MobaXterm which provides an SSH client, inbuilt text file editor and X11 graphpics viewer plus a bash shell envioronment. Although this is a bigger install, it is recommended (instead of putty and xming) if you will be accessing HPC machines regularly. There is a 'portable' version of MobaXterm which does not need admin install privilages.
- on Windows, if you are not using MobaXterm, you can use putty from https://www.putty.org/ - xming X11 graphics viewer,
- for Mac https://www.xquartz.org/,
- for Windows (if you are not using MobaXterm) http://sourceforge.net/projects/xming/files/Xming/6.9.0.31/Xming-6-9-0-31-setup.exe/download
We have recorded an ARCHER Screencast: Logging on to ARCHER from Windows using PuTTY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVFQg1qFjKQ
Logging on to the NEXTGenIO prototype system is very similar, but substitute hydra-vpn.epcc.ed.ac.uk as the login address, followed by nextgenio-login1.
We will provide accounts on the NEXTGenIO system for all attendees who register in advance.
Course Materials
All the course materials, including lecture notes and exercise materials will be available on the Course Materials page.
In addition, links to join each of the four online sessions, and recordings of previous sessions will be available on the course materials page.
