The Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), a US Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) will hold its 16th annual User Meeting June 3–4, 2020.
This year, however, there will be a noticeable difference: Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the OLCF’s 2020 User Meeting will be held entirely online.
Of course, previous user meetings have always offered the option to attend remotely—a necessity considering the international diversity of the OLCF’s user base—and although this year’s meeting is fully virtual, its goal remains the same. Through the annual meeting, OLCF staff and users are able to interact with each other in an environment that promotes collaboration and a strong relationship between the facility and its users.
“The User Meeting is about putting researchers—both current and future OLCF users—together with facility members to foster new discoveries and stronger relationships,” said Ashley Barker, group leader for the OLCF’s User Assistance and Outreach Group.
The meeting will showcase selected computational science and engineering achievements emerging from the OLCF’s user programs, including an overview of early experiences using HIP on Summit, ORNL’s 200 petaflop IBM AC922 supercomputer, which launched in 2018.
On the first day, the OLCF will offer an optional training event aimed at preparing new users to run on Summit. Throughout the day, OLCF staff members will cover topics such as system architecture, file systems and data transfers, and Summit’s batch scheduler and job launcher.
Other talks will give important updates about the OLCF, including a new system coming in 2020, new user services, and the status of Frontier—the OLCF’s exascale supercomputer slated for delivery in 2021.
“We believe we can still have an impactful OLCF User Meeting even though this year it will be totally virtual,” Barker said. “There are a lot of new activities underway at the OLCF, and we look forward to the opportunity to convey this information and get feedback from our users on these activities.”
Other highlights include a facility overview from Gina Tourassi, director of the National Center for Computational Sciences, and election results for the OLCF User Group Executive Board.
Registration for the 2020 User Meeting, as well as the full agenda and connection details, can be found here.
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