HPC Champions workshop

Sep 17, 2020, 1:00 PM → Sep 18, 2020, 5:00 PM Europe/London

Anna Brown (University of Oxford), SORSE 2020

The next HPC Champions workshop will be held virtually over 2 afternoons on the 17th/18th September, and will involve talks, discussion sessions and working group sessions. Topics covered will include updates from the national and regional supercomputing sites, training, and plans for knowledge and skills repositories. The workshop will run between 1pm and 5pm BST, 12pm and 4pm UTC on each day. 

Please register here to attend the workshop, and we encourage you to also submit a lightning talk, discussion session or working group suggestion.

HPC Champions is a network of individuals with the goal of supporting HPC users in the UK to learn about HPC, find the most appropriate system for their purposes, and to get the most out of that system. The roughly bi-annual HPC Champions workshops play a key part in this, increasing the coordination between the different tiers of HPC in the UK and acting as a launching point for collaboration on projects related to training, outreach, reference materials and more. 

The network includes a wide number of HPC communities including RSEs and system administrators from the local, regional and national supercomputing centres, as well representatives of HPC consortia, and we encourage anyone with an interest in supporting researchers and RSEs to make the best possible use of the HPC resources to attend. HPC Champions has been co-located with both the RSE Conference and HPC-SIG in the past, and this time is partnered with the International Series of Online Research Software Events (SORSE).

If you have any questions, please contact anna.brown@oerc.ox.ac.uk

By joining the event in Zoom, I hereby confirm that I have read and understood the privacy policies for participation.

Thursday, September 17

1 Introduction

Ania Brown, University of Oxford, University of Southampton

2 HPC Champions -- purpose and background

Alan Simpson, EPCC

3 Archer 2 Update

Andy Turner, EPCC

1:40 PM Break

4 Tier 2 Updates

NI -- Luis Fernandez Menchero
NICE N-8 -- Alan Real
JADE 1/2 -- Twin Karmakharm
Cirrus 1/2 -- Kieran Leach
Thomas/Michael -- Heather Kelly
Isambard -- James Grant
Midlands+ -- Laurence Hurst

3:00 PM Break

5 Talks

Investigating application performance on the A64FX – Adrian Jackson, EPCC

Singularity -- Twin Karmakharm, University of Sheffield

4:00 PM Free discussion

Friday, September 18

6 Overview of discussion/working group topics

Diversity and mentoring for the ECSE proposals -- James Grant, University of Bath

Understanding the HPC Skills Gap -- Cristin Merritt, Alces Flight Limited

HPC Benchmarking and performance analysis -- Andy Turner, EPCC

Peer support through a skills database -- Ania Brown, University of Oxford, University of Southampton

7 Lightning talks

EasyBuild/Spack — William Lucas

eCSE - Chris Johnson

Online Training – David Henty

Containers on ARCHER2 -- Michael Bareford

EuroCC - Lorna Smith

8 Discussion session 1 -- Diversity and mentoring for the ECSE proposals

2:30 PM Break

9 Discussion session 2 -- Understanding the HPC Skills Gap

10 Discussion session 3 -- Peer support through a skills database

11 Reporting back from breakout groups

4:00 PM Free discussion