APAC National Facility - Notices and News


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Notices and News of the APAC National Facility

Emergency messages:
None

System Downtimes Scheduled downtimes

Jun 25, 9-11am MDSS DOWNTIME - dc cluster and store will be down from 9am-11am to install 3 new 16Tbyte disk trays, and update the firmware on all of the existing disk trays.

For details of all previous downtimes on a particular system, follow the links:

Altix AC

LinuxCluster LC

Mass Data Storage System - MDSS

Call for 2006 Annual Reports Submission of 2006 Annual Reports was due by 13 April 2007.

Log in Messages
(motd) The current messages of the day of National Facility computers, as seen when logging in, including notices and current useful tips.

Software Updates List of the latest software updates on the National Facility systems.

DEST review of APAC The Department of Education, Science and Training has commissioned a review of APAC and has invited APAC to make a submission. Their letter of advice is available as a .doc file via the link on the left. The terms of reference for the review are available here. An email was sent to Merit Scheme principal investigators with advice on what they might do to contribute to the review.

MAS Grants Grants Information for the present and past years. The grants for each 3 month quarter are available at 0000hrs on the first day of the new quarter.

Call for MAS applications
2 October 2008 Applications are now being requested for the period Jan 2009 - Dec 2009. The deadline for applications is 2 Nov 2008.

Latest Newsletter Newsletter for December 2007. See below for previous newsletters.

Archived Mails Archive of previous emails broadcast to users of the facility.

Conferences, Workshops and Meetings

APAC 07 APAC conference and exhibition to be held in Perth from 8 - 12 Oct 2007.

Events A detailed list of events from Supercomputing Online.

Past Events

Workshop on Parallel Coupled Models The APAC CT&T project held a one-day workshop on parallel coupled models at ANU on April 10 2006. Slides of the presentations are available at http://nf.apac.edu.au/ctt/Coupled_workshop/coupled_workshop.php

APAC'05 26 - 29 September 2005 Join us at APAC'05, the APAC Conference and Exhibition on Advanced Computing, Grid Applications and eResearch. Read the announcement here or go direct to the APAC'05 web site via the link on the left.

IBM Chem & Life Sciences IBM seminars on Deep Computing in Computational Chemistry and Life Sciences

HPCAsia 2004 Asia-Pacific conference in Japan 20-22 July 2004.

Gaussian Workshop University of Sydney,June 28 - July 1, 2004. Details from Gaussian website.

Old News Items

Old Newsletters October 2006 Newsletter
May 2006 Newsletter
August 2005 Newsletter
April 2005 Newsletter
September 2004 Newsletter
April 2004 Newsletter
October 2003 Newsletter
April 2003 Newsletter
February 2003 Newsletter
September 2002 Newsletter
June 2002 Newsletter

New SGI AC system available All accounts from the SC/LC have now been enabled on the Altix system ac.apac.edu.au. More details regarding using the system and the transfer of files has been sent to all users. A copy can be found here and other information in the newsletters below.

Alphaserver SC service ended 23 June The AlphaServer SC was decommissioned at 12 noon on 23 June. A copy of detailed information mailed out to all users can be found here.
Our tribute page to the SC can be found here.

APAC Annual Reports 2004 call Projects which have used APAC National Facility time are required to provide a description and progress report for inclusion in the APAC National Facility Annual Report. A brief report is required on both terminating and continuing projects.

APAC NF New System Announced APAC announced on 17 February that SGI is the contracted supplier of the new National Facility system to replace the Alphaserver SC. The email sent to users is at the link to the left.

New Peak System
June 2004 The Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing has issued a request for proposals for the supply of a peak computing system and associated services valued at $12.5M to replace the Alphaserver SC and GS. The new system is expected to be installed early next year and is expected to be considerably more powerful than the current systems.

/massdata unmounted
24 June 2002 The /massdata filesystem has been permanently unmounted. Access to massdata directories is solely by utility commands to ensure efficient usage. Please start using the utilities mdss, netcp, netmv and the copyq NOW (see man pages or userguide webpage). Please report any problems with mdss, netcp and netmv.

System Upgrade
7 May 2002 The SC system memory was upgraded to :
  80 nodes of 4GB
  36 nodes of 8GB
   4 nodes of 16GB
After the upgrade, large memory jobs (2000MB/cpu) will only be run on the large memory nodes. Smaller jobs will be able to run on any node. This will mainly affect the single CPU jobs with large memory requests. To ensure good turn around times, users should not request more memory for a job than it needs.

The Operating System was updated to SC2.4PK1A. The compilers were updated as well. The release notes can either be found on the system, or on the web:
  Fortran Runtime Library : /usr/lib/cmplrs/fortrtl_403/dfartl.relnotes
  Fortran90 : /usr/lib/cmplrs/fort90_550/relnotes90
  Fortran (using -old_f77) : /usr/lib/cmplrs/fort_550/relnotes
  C++ : http://nf.apac.edu.au/facilities/sc/software/CXX/rnu.htm
  Ladebug Debugger : http://nf.apac.edu.au/facilities/sc/software/ladebug.php

Call for MAS applications
18 Apr 2002 Applications are now being requested for the period Jul 2002 - Jun 2003. The deadline is 20 May 2002. Projects with allocations until Dec 2002 do not need to reapply at this time but new projects and projects with allocations expiring June 2002 should (re)apply now.

Computational Science Courses at the ANU
In first semester (starts March 4th 2002) the ANU Dept of Computer Science is offering two courses that may be of interest to regional users of the APAC NF. Parallel Systems and High Performance Scientific Computation. Anyone interested in attending these courses should contact Alistair.Rendell@anu.edu.au (phone (02) 6125 4386).
Also, a Data Mining Course contact Markus.Hegland@anu.edu.au

CFD/Fluent Workshop
30 Jan 2002 A CFD/Fluent 1 day workshop will be run at the ANU on Wednesday 30 January 2002. The workshop will be given by Brent Matthews of CFDRES. If you would like to attend please contact Stuart Midgley stuart.midgley@anu.edu.au. Attendance is limited to 12 people.

MAC outcomes The Merit Allocation committee met on 20 Dec and has emailed awards for calendar year 2002 projects to Principal Investigators and associated users. New grants will be available 2 Jan. Oct-Dec 2001 grants will be available until 2 Jan.

Annual Report Call Projects which have used APAC National Facility time are required to provide a description and progress report for inclusion in the APAC National Facility Annual Report. A brief report is required on both terminating projects and continuing projects.

SC45 production begins
30 Oct 2001 The 120 node AlphaServer SC45 commenced production service. A further software upgrade will be applied in a few weeks to achieve full network performance.

Call for MAS applications
Oct 2001 Applications are now being requested for the period Jan-Dec 2002. The deadline is 9 November 2001. Projects with allocations until June 2002 do not need to reapply at this time but new projects and projects with allocations expiring at the end of the year should (re)apply now.

ES45s arrive
29 Sept 2001 The ES45 racks for the phase 2 system have arrived and are being installed. The new 480 processor system will be installed and accepted over the next few weeks. The operational system has had to be reduced to 16 nodes, plus a 16 processor GS system during the upgrade.

Call for MAS applications
9 May 2001 New applications are now being accepted for the period July 2001 to June 2002 with an application deadline of 4 June 2001. Current users do not need to reapply at this time - you will automatically be given an allocation for Oct-Dec 01 and asked later this year to apply for time in 2002.

Service commenced
30 April 2001 The APAC National Facility service has commenced.

Scaling of MAS allocations
27 April 2001 The scaling of MAS grants from those made last year has reduced the number of hours granted. As explained in emails, the computational power represented by the new grants is at least that which you would have had on the originally planned system last year. It should also have been stated that the scaling was calculated to fully allocate the MAS resources.

Notifications to users
22th April 2001 Principal Investigators should receive a letter in the week beginning April 23 with details of allocations, connected usernames and passwords. All registered users will receive an email late in that week with information to help getting started.

Passed Acceptance
17th April 2001 The Compaq AlphaServer SC has successfully passed a 120 hour uptime test as well as exceeding contractual performance tests. The system has now been accepted and is on track for the commencement of the APAC National Facility service on 30 April 2001.

Hardware Arrives
26th March 2001 The first crates containing the Compaq AlphaServer SC to be installed at the APAC National Facility arrived. Hardware and software install is expected to take two weeks.

Contract Signed
Feb 2001 APAC recently announced the signing of a contract with COMPAQ to provide the computational system for the National Facility. It is now expected the APAC National Facility system will be operational for users as of 30 April 2001. Account holders will be advised of passwords and allocations shorlty before that date.

Merit Scheme Grants
Feb 2001 The Merit Allocation Committee made grants of time under the Merit Allocation Scheme last year. These grants will be scaled appropriately to determine the initial set of allocations in the "quarters" May-June 2001, July-September 2001 and October-December 2001. ( See the email bulletin Email to Merit Allocation Holders, Feb 2001.)
In 2 October 2008 a call will be issued for additional proposals to the Merit Allocation Scheme for the period Jan 2009 - Dec 2009 from those not already holding grants.
Researchers already holding grants need not apply at that time. Late this year there will be a call to submit proposals for the period January 2002 - December 2002 to which current grant holders should respond.
All details about the Merit Allocation Scheme and getting accounts can be found via the Accounts page. Details of the planned facilities are on the Facilities page.

Email problems, suggestions, questions to

Emergency messages:	None

System Downtimes	Scheduled downtimes Jun 25, 9-11am MDSS DOWNTIME - dc cluster and store will be down from 9am-11am to install 3 new 16Tbyte disk trays, and update the firmware on all of the existing disk trays. For details of all previous downtimes on a particular system, follow the links: Altix AC LinuxCluster LC Mass Data Storage System - MDSS

Call for 2006 Annual Reports	Submission of 2006 Annual Reports was due by 13 April 2007.

Log in Messages (motd)	The current messages of the day of National Facility computers, as seen when logging in, including notices and current useful tips.

Software Updates	List of the latest software updates on the National Facility systems.

DEST review of APAC	The Department of Education, Science and Training has commissioned a review of APAC and has invited APAC to make a submission. Their letter of advice is available as a .doc file via the link on the left. The terms of reference for the review are available here. An email was sent to Merit Scheme principal investigators with advice on what they might do to contribute to the review.

MAS Grants	Grants Information for the present and past years. The grants for each 3 month quarter are available at 0000hrs on the first day of the new quarter.

Call for MAS applications 2 October 2008	Applications are now being requested for the period Jan 2009 - Dec 2009. The deadline for applications is 2 Nov 2008.

Latest Newsletter	Newsletter for December 2007. See below for previous newsletters.

Archived Mails	Archive of previous emails broadcast to users of the facility.

APAC 07	APAC conference and exhibition to be held in Perth from 8 - 12 Oct 2007.

Events	A detailed list of events from Supercomputing Online.

Past Events
Workshop on Parallel Coupled Models	The APAC CT&T project held a one-day workshop on parallel coupled models at ANU on April 10 2006. Slides of the presentations are available at http://nf.apac.edu.au/ctt/Coupled_workshop/coupled_workshop.php

APAC'05 26 - 29 September 2005	Join us at APAC'05, the APAC Conference and Exhibition on Advanced Computing, Grid Applications and eResearch. Read the announcement here or go direct to the APAC'05 web site via the link on the left.

IBM Chem & Life Sciences	IBM seminars on Deep Computing in Computational Chemistry and Life Sciences

HPCAsia 2004	Asia-Pacific conference in Japan 20-22 July 2004.

Gaussian Workshop	University of Sydney,June 28 - July 1, 2004. Details from Gaussian website.

Old Newsletters	October 2006 Newsletter May 2006 Newsletter August 2005 Newsletter April 2005 Newsletter September 2004 Newsletter April 2004 Newsletter October 2003 Newsletter April 2003 Newsletter February 2003 Newsletter September 2002 Newsletter June 2002 Newsletter

New SGI AC system available	All accounts from the SC/LC have now been enabled on the Altix system ac.apac.edu.au. More details regarding using the system and the transfer of files has been sent to all users. A copy can be found here and other information in the newsletters below.

Alphaserver SC service ended 23 June	The AlphaServer SC was decommissioned at 12 noon on 23 June. A copy of detailed information mailed out to all users can be found here. Our tribute page to the SC can be found here.

APAC Annual Reports 2004 call	Projects which have used APAC National Facility time are required to provide a description and progress report for inclusion in the APAC National Facility Annual Report. A brief report is required on both terminating and continuing projects.

APAC NF New System Announced	APAC announced on 17 February that SGI is the contracted supplier of the new National Facility system to replace the Alphaserver SC. The email sent to users is at the link to the left.

New Peak System June 2004	The Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing has issued a request for proposals for the supply of a peak computing system and associated services valued at $12.5M to replace the Alphaserver SC and GS. The new system is expected to be installed early next year and is expected to be considerably more powerful than the current systems.

/massdata unmounted 24 June 2002	The /massdata filesystem has been permanently unmounted. Access to massdata directories is solely by utility commands to ensure efficient usage. Please start using the utilities mdss, netcp, netmv and the copyq NOW (see man pages or userguide webpage). Please report any problems with mdss, netcp and netmv.

System Upgrade 7 May 2002	The SC system memory was upgraded to : 80 nodes of 4GB 36 nodes of 8GB 4 nodes of 16GB After the upgrade, large memory jobs (2000MB/cpu) will only be run on the large memory nodes. Smaller jobs will be able to run on any node. This will mainly affect the single CPU jobs with large memory requests. To ensure good turn around times, users should not request more memory for a job than it needs. The Operating System was updated to SC2.4PK1A. The compilers were updated as well. The release notes can either be found on the system, or on the web: Fortran Runtime Library : `/usr/lib/cmplrs/fortrtl_403/dfartl.relnotes` Fortran90 : `/usr/lib/cmplrs/fort90_550/relnotes90` Fortran (using -old_f77) : `/usr/lib/cmplrs/fort_550/relnotes` C++ : http://nf.apac.edu.au/facilities/sc/software/CXX/rnu.htm Ladebug Debugger : http://nf.apac.edu.au/facilities/sc/software/ladebug.php

Call for MAS applications 18 Apr 2002	Applications are now being requested for the period Jul 2002 - Jun 2003. The deadline is 20 May 2002. Projects with allocations until Dec 2002 do not need to reapply at this time but new projects and projects with allocations expiring June 2002 should (re)apply now.

Computational Science Courses at the ANU	In first semester (starts March 4th 2002) the ANU Dept of Computer Science is offering two courses that may be of interest to regional users of the APAC NF. Parallel Systems and High Performance Scientific Computation. Anyone interested in attending these courses should contact Alistair.Rendell@anu.edu.au (phone (02) 6125 4386). Also, a Data Mining Course contact Markus.Hegland@anu.edu.au

CFD/Fluent Workshop 30 Jan 2002	A CFD/Fluent 1 day workshop will be run at the ANU on Wednesday 30 January 2002. The workshop will be given by Brent Matthews of CFDRES. If you would like to attend please contact Stuart Midgley stuart.midgley@anu.edu.au. Attendance is limited to 12 people.

MAC outcomes	The Merit Allocation committee met on 20 Dec and has emailed awards for calendar year 2002 projects to Principal Investigators and associated users. New grants will be available 2 Jan. Oct-Dec 2001 grants will be available until 2 Jan.

Annual Report Call	Projects which have used APAC National Facility time are required to provide a description and progress report for inclusion in the APAC National Facility Annual Report. A brief report is required on both terminating projects and continuing projects.

SC45 production begins 30 Oct 2001	The 120 node AlphaServer SC45 commenced production service. A further software upgrade will be applied in a few weeks to achieve full network performance.

Call for MAS applications Oct 2001	Applications are now being requested for the period Jan-Dec 2002. The deadline is 9 November 2001. Projects with allocations until June 2002 do not need to reapply at this time but new projects and projects with allocations expiring at the end of the year should (re)apply now.

ES45s arrive 29 Sept 2001	The ES45 racks for the phase 2 system have arrived and are being installed. The new 480 processor system will be installed and accepted over the next few weeks. The operational system has had to be reduced to 16 nodes, plus a 16 processor GS system during the upgrade.

Call for MAS applications 9 May 2001	New applications are now being accepted for the period July 2001 to June 2002 with an application deadline of 4 June 2001. Current users do not need to reapply at this time - you will automatically be given an allocation for Oct-Dec 01 and asked later this year to apply for time in 2002.

Service commenced 30 April 2001	The APAC National Facility service has commenced.

Scaling of MAS allocations 27 April 2001	The scaling of MAS grants from those made last year has reduced the number of hours granted. As explained in emails, the computational power represented by the new grants is at least that which you would have had on the originally planned system last year. It should also have been stated that the scaling was calculated to fully allocate the MAS resources.

Notifications to users 22th April 2001	Principal Investigators should receive a letter in the week beginning April 23 with details of allocations, connected usernames and passwords. All registered users will receive an email late in that week with information to help getting started.

Passed Acceptance 17th April 2001	The Compaq AlphaServer SC has successfully passed a 120 hour uptime test as well as exceeding contractual performance tests. The system has now been accepted and is on track for the commencement of the APAC National Facility service on 30 April 2001.

Hardware Arrives 26th March 2001	The first crates containing the Compaq AlphaServer SC to be installed at the APAC National Facility arrived. Hardware and software install is expected to take two weeks.

Contract Signed Feb 2001	APAC recently announced the signing of a contract with COMPAQ to provide the computational system for the National Facility. It is now expected the APAC National Facility system will be operational for users as of 30 April 2001. Account holders will be advised of passwords and allocations shorlty before that date.

Merit Scheme Grants Feb 2001	The Merit Allocation Committee made grants of time under the Merit Allocation Scheme last year. These grants will be scaled appropriately to determine the initial set of allocations in the "quarters" May-June 2001, July-September 2001 and October-December 2001. ( See the email bulletin Email to Merit Allocation Holders, Feb 2001.) In 2 October 2008 a call will be issued for additional proposals to the Merit Allocation Scheme for the period Jan 2009 - Dec 2009 from those not already holding grants. Researchers already holding grants need not apply at that time. Late this year there will be a call to submit proposals for the period January 2002 - December 2002 to which current grant holders should respond. All details about the Merit Allocation Scheme and getting accounts can be found via the Accounts page. Details of the planned facilities are on the Facilities page.