In This Message

Center Announcements
  – RHEL8 Upgrade on Summit (Aug 19)
  – Applications Open for the IDEAS-ECP 2022 BSSw Fellowship Program
  – HPC Best Practices Webinar (Sep 15)

Meetings & Workshops
  – 2021 CUDA Training Series (Sep 14 & Oct 13)
  – Slate Workshop (Aug 25-26)
  – 2021 GPU Hackathons (deadline to apply is today, Aug 18)
  – Facility Testing of E4S via E4S Testsuite, Spack Test, and Buildtest (Sep 14)
  – Introduction to OpenMP GPU Offloading (Sep 22-23)

Upcoming Scheduled Outages
  – Summit (Through Aug 19)

Center Announcements

IMPORTANT: Summit RHEL8 Upgrade Information
Summit is currently unavailable and is scheduled to return by 8:00 AM on Thursday, August 19. During this outage, the OS is being upgraded to RHEL 8. We want to make you aware of several important items as you begin using the upgraded system:

  • You should recompile codes prior to running on the upgraded system.
  • The OS-provided Python is no longer accessible as python (including variations like /usr/bin/python or /usr/bin/env python); rather, you must specify it as python2 or python3. If you are using python from one of the modulefiles rather than the version in /usr/bin, this change should not affect how you invoke python in your scripts, although we encourage specifying python2 or python3 as a best practice.
  • A list of default version changes including XL, CUDA, Spectrum, and ESSL as well as older versions scheduled for removal can be found on the Software News page.

If you have any questions or concerns about this upgrade, contact the User Assistance Center at help@olcf.ornl.gov.

Applications Open for the IDEAS-ECP 2022 BSSw Fellowship Program
The Better Scientific Software (BSSw) Fellowship program fosters and promotes practices, processes and tools to improve developer productivity and software sustainability of scientific codes. Each 2022 BSSw Fellow will receive up to $25,000 for an activity that promotes better scientific software. See this blog post for more information.

HPC Best Practices Webinar (Sep 15)
The IDEAS Productivity project, in partnership with the DOE Computing Facilities of the ALCF, OLCF, and NERSC and the DOE Exascale Computing Project (ECP) run a webinar series on Best Practices for HPC Software Developers. The September webinar will be presented by Wolfgang Bangerth and is titled What I Learned from 20 Years of Leading Open Source Projects. The webinar will take place on Wednesday, September 15, 2021 at 2:00 pm ET. The webinar is free and open to the public, but registration is required and is available at https://exascaleproject.zoomgov.com/meeting/register/vJIsd-qprjgpEv1GMg5MlnUUhVIJir2ocas.

Meetings & Workshops

2021 CUDA Training Series (Sep 14 & Oct 13)
NVIDIA will continue their CUDA Training Series with the webinars listed below. Each webinar will include a presentation and hands-on exercises. Webinars will be held from 1 PM to 3 PM (Eastern Time). More information about these sessions and recordings of previous sessions can be found at https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/cuda-training-series/.

  – CUDA Debugging (Tuesday, September 14) Register here
  – CUDA Graphs (Wednesday, October 13) Register here

Slate Workshop (Aug 25-26)
OLCF will host a Slate workshop on August 25 and 26 from 1:00 PM until 3:00 PM (Eastern Time). This workshop aims to help OLCF/NCCS users and NCCS staff generate smoother workflows for their applications running on Summit and NCCS Open resources. Slate is a Kubernetes-based container orchestration service for users to run persistent application services that do not fit into a batch job (such as workflow management systems and data portals) with access to NCCS filesystems and cluster job queues. This will be a virtual workshop hosted on Zoom. For details and registration, see https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/calendar/olcf-slate-hackathon/.

2021 GPU Hackathons
The 2021 NVIDIA GPU Hackathon series is winding down. The final OLCF-supported Hackathon is the OLCF-hosted (virtual) Hackathon which will be held on October 18 and 25-27. The deadline to apply is today (August 18). For more information and to apply, go to https://www.gpuhackathons.org/events.

Facility Testing of E4S via E4S Testsuite, Spack Test, and Buildtest (Sep 14)
The presentation will provide a brief overview of buildtest commands and how to write tests in buildspecs, followed by a demo. The presentation will include an overview of Cori testsuite, which is a repository that contains sanity test for the Cori system including E4S tests using E4S tests. Gitlab is used to help automate execution of tests which are pushed to CDASH for post-processing. The presentation will end with a summary of E4S tests that are run on Cori, as well as current challenges.

For more information or to register, visit https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/calendar/facility-testing-of-e4s-via-e4s-testsuite-spack-test-and-buildtest/.

Introduction to OpenMP GPU Offloading (Sep 22-23)
On September 22-23 from 1-3:30 PM (ET) the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF)
will offer a (virtual) Introduction to OpenMP GPU Offloading. This training is meant for OLCF
users who are already familiar with the basic ideas of GPU programming but who want to learn
about the core GPU offloading capabilities of OpenMP.

During each day of the training, OLCF staff will give a lecture followed by hands-on exercises for
the participants to work through. On day 1, we will give a general overview of the OpenMP
programming model and cover the basics of using OpenMP directives to offload work to GPUs.
On day 2, we will discuss optimization strategies and show how efficient data movement and a
better understanding of the hierarchy of parallelism available can lead to improved
performance. The hands-on exercises will be available in both C and Fortran and will be
designed to work with a variety of compilers. Time will be reserved for users to work through
the examples during the training and a slack channel will be available for questions during and
after each training session.

For more information or to register, visit https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/calendar/introduction-to-openmp-gpu-offloading/.

Upcoming Scheduled Outages

  • Summit will be unavailable until 8:00 AM on Thursday, August 19.