Dear taki Users, dear colleagues, dear students,

I am writing as chair of the governance committee and faculty-lead for the user support in HPCF.

First of all, I am glad that you are all users of our system! We hope that it is useful to you and enables you to conduct more research.

Then as general reminders:

- For all, please send me citations for papers and theses (undergrad, Master's, PhD)! This is for our HPCF Publications webpage and our most important documentation of the success of HPCF.

- For PIs, you might want to review the users who have access to your group's data. These are the users in your Unix group. You can see the usernames of all from the output of the "getent group" command; to see your own group's users only, pipe the output into the grep command.  For instance, for me with username gobbert, my group is pi_gobbert, so I issue the command

getent group | grep pi_gobbert

to see all users who are in my Unix group. The point is that some of your students may have graduated or some previous collaborators are not active any more.

- For PIs, if you could, review which projects we list for your group.  Maybe you have new/additional ones (or maybe we failed to post ones that you submitted). Just send me the title, abstract, and people involved.

Finally, the real point of this message is that I am offering to meet with all interested in an online user meeting. Rough agenda:

1. Welcome, thank-you, introductions of HPCF staff and all attendees.

2. Review of the HPCF webpage, in particular, of the systems available.

3. Overview of ongoing projects to improve documentation (Matlab, R).

4. Collection of technical questions and comments on the existing systems.

5. Collection of suggestions for the future.

6. If needed, meeting of PIs only.

The meeting will be in one week, the Friday before the start of the spring 2022 semester, that is, Friday 01/28/2022, 11:00-12:00, online in my personal room at https://umbc.webex.com/meet/gobbert

Thank you all,

Matthias Gobbert, Math & Stat, gobbert@umbc.edu,

chair, HPCF Governance Committee

module load MATLAB

The older versions of Matlab are also still available in case you need to use them. You can see the versions of Matlab we currently have installed on Taki with this command:

module spider MATLAB

Let us know if you have any problems by submitting tickets at this address:

-----------------

Randy Philipp

Dear Researchers, Colleagues, and Students,

Technical staff from NVIDIA will give us a 30 minute intro call to go over their new product releases and see how NVIDIA might be able to help us escalate our AI initiatives and speak to our current use cases and projects.

This is this Wednesday, 10/13/2021, 01:00 p.m. at the conference line 703-871-85

02 (passcode/roomcode 3761).

If you cannot make it, but would like me to send you a copy of the notes that I intend to take, please drop me a note in conventional e-mail.

Even if you intend to attend synchronously, you may want to send me questions beforehand, so I can share them with NVIDIA by e-mail for preparation. For instance, what applications do you use or wish to use on GPUs? What programming language (CUDA or OpenCL?)? What is limiting you from accomplishing more?

Matthias Gobbert, Mathematics and Statistics, gobbert@umbc.edu

(Chair of the HPCF Governance Committee)

module spider intel

Please let us know if you have any questions.

You can use the following page to submit a support request:

/https://doit.umbc.edu/request-tracker-rt/doit-research-computing/

-------------

Randy Philipp

Senior HPC System Administrator

This is just an update regarding a new set of software packages now available on the taki cluster environment, CDO. 

From the requestor and main CDO site (https://code.mpimet.mpg.de/projects/cdo/).

CDO is a set of command line operations geared toward analysis of geophysical data, especially from climate numerical weather prediction models.  Operations include, among many others, horizontal re-gridding and vertical interpolation, various forms of temporal averaging, and the addition or subtraction of variables across different files. They can be applied to netCDF4 and GRIB files. Users outside of the atmospheric science community may find many of the CDO operations useful, but note that some will only work if the data includes geographical dimensions.

For information on loading CDO and associated modules into your user environment, run `module spider CDO`.

Thanks for reading,

See the link for further details.

Dear Researchers, Colleagues, and Students,

We are happy to share the news that HPCF is able to extend the CPU cluster in taki by 17 new nodes. DoIT has placed the purchase order last week.

We have to thank 10 faculty from 9 departments and research centers in all 3 colleges at UMBC for their community spirit and ability to help us all with this extension, namely:

CNMS:

Joe Bennett (Chemistry) 3 nodes,

Pengwang Zhai (Physics) 4 nodes,

Larrabee Strow (Physics) 1 node,

Matthias Gobbert (Mathematics and Statistics) 2 nodes

including one funded by Jerimy Polf (UMB School of Medicine),

COEIT:

Tyler Josephson (CBEE) 3 nodes,

Curtis Menyuk (CSEE) 1 node,

Chuck Eggleton (Mechanical Engineering) 1 node,

CAHSS:

Matt Baker (GES) 1 node,

Lee Boot (IRC and IS) 1 node.

Dear Researchers, Colleagues, and Students,

This message starts with the usual reminder to send me references to publications that used HPCF and its cluster taki, so that we can post them as products of the NSF funding and the administration's support.  Students, if you are graduating, please send me the title of your thesis, since those are a particular example of the community support.

But my request goes farther this time: The Faculty Senate passed the Faculty Senate Open Access Resolution (https://lib.guides.umbc.edu/c.php?g=728911&p=5872742), and this supports providing free access to our work in an archive called MD-SOAR (https://mdsoar.org/) for open access to the public.

Michelle Flinchbaugh <flinchba@umbc.edu> from the AOK Library has copied over those publications from our HPCF publications page that had actual PDF files attached.

If you have preprints of your past work, whose reference we might already have on the HPCF publications page, please send them to me.  This would improve our publications page and immensely help the Library to expand the work in MD-SOAR, which in turn raises visibility for your work and for UMBC.

I find this a very worthwhile effort, with support from the Faculty Senate, and we can all help and profit from this visibility. You can also copy Michelle, of course, for questions or to send the PDFs. My offer to collect them at HPCF first just tries to help out.

I would much appreciate your help with this initiative. If you have the PDF files already on your own publication page, please just let me know.

Matthias Gobbert, Mathematics and Statistics, gobbert@umbc.edu

(Chair of the HPCF Governance Committee and PI of the MRI grants to HPCF)

MATLAB 2021a has been installed on the taki cluster environment. It is available as module 'MATLAB/2021a'. The default MATLAB module is 'MATLAB/2020b'.

MATLAB 2021a: https://www.mathworks.com/company/newsroom/mathworks-introduces-release-2021a-of-matlab-and-simulink.html

Go: https://golang.org/

Dear Researchers, Colleagues, and Students,

Thanks to many of you for sending information on publications, including journal and conference papers and also theses (senior/undergrad, Master's, PhD). Please, keep sending this information! The publications list is the most vital demonstration of success of HPCF both to the NSF and to the UMBC administration.

I am happy to share the new totals with you: The users generated over 400 publications, including 150 papers in peer-reviewed journals (including Nature, Science, and other top-tier journals in their fields), 50 refereed conference papers, and 50 theses. This count started in 2008, when HPCF was formally established. The detailed list is available on the HPCF webpage under Publications.

This is also currently reported to the NSF in the MRI Final Report for the three-year grant awarded in 2017. This final report also includes an Outcomes Report, which is also posted on the HPCF webpage under the Research tab. This same tab has list of projects using taki, a handout, poster, and presentation slides, and more. In particular, please use the Supporting Materials link for Acknowledgments text for publications.

This is also a chance for a special thanks to the HPCF RAs Reetam Majumder and Carlos Barajas! They support me and the user community and sys admin with many things, but also particularly with the publications and project lists and the NSF report.

Matthias Gobbert, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, gobbert@umbc.edu

(Chair of the HPCF Governance Committee and PI of the MRI grants)