Monthly User Conference Calls

The OLCF hosts monthly User Conference Calls. These calls are your opportunity to speak with center personnel to get the latest updates, express any concerns you may have, etc. No registration is required for this event. An email with an invite to the event will be sent to OLCF users approximately one week beforehand.

Next Call

Past Calls

Date	Title	Speaker	Description
April 30, 2025	April 2025 OLCF User Conference Call: Quantum Hardware in HPC Centers: Integration and Performance Benchmarking	Peter Groszkowski	Quantum computers will likely play an important role in the future of computing, as they promise to solve problems that are traditionally hard to explore on classical (even high-performance) hardware. It is also becoming clear that both noisy, as well as future, fully error-corrected machines will have to work closely...
March 26, 2025	March 2025 OLCF User Conference Call: myOLCF Ticket Integration	Kita Cranfill, Suzanne Prentice	During this presentation, myOLCF developers will introduce myOLCF's new ticket integration system: a feature that allows you to create and interact with tickets solely through myOLCF instead of emailing [email protected]. Explaining its limitations, potential future additions, and answering questions will also be covered during the call.
February 26, 2025	February 2025 OLCF User Conference Call: The Digital Chemistry Revolution – A Synergy of HPC, AI, and Quantum Mechanics	Giuseppe Barca	During this presentation, Giuseppe Barca will give an overview of his team's efforts running on Frontier that led to winning the 2024 ACM Gordon Bell Prize ("Breaking the Million-Electron and 1 EFLOP/s Barriers: Biomolecular-Scale Ab Initio Molecular Dynamics Using MP2 Potentials"): Scientific progress in fields such as drug discovery, sustainable...
January 29, 2025	January 2025 OLCF User Conference Call: On Monitoring Energy Consumption of Frontier Applications	Ashesh Sharma, Bruno Alvarez Villasenor	Understanding energy demands and power characteristics of supercomputing applications is crucial to attaining sustainable high-performance computing. In this presentation, we will discuss a collection of pathways to measuring the power and energy consumption associated with production runs on Frontier. With focus on Cray's node-level power management counters, as well as...
December 4, 2024	December 2024 OLCF User Conference Call: Velocity	Asa Rentschler	Velocity is a tool to help with the maintenance of container build scripts on multiple systems, backends (e.g podman or apptainer) and distros. Often, when building containers, you may want to try different distros or combinations of software. Usually, this requires copying your container script and making modifications. Velocity aims...
October 30, 2024	October 2024 OLCF User Conference Call: Kronos Overview and Data Migration	Gregg Gawinski, Jake Wynne	Kronos is the center’s new nearline storage resource that is replacing the HPSS data archival system. As opposed to using “hsi” to manage data, users will directly interact with the Kronos’ GPFS disk sub-system on the Data Transfer Nodes (DTNs) that will automatically be stored on the system’s tape sub-system....
August 28, 2024	August 2024 OLCF User Conference Call: Containers on Frontier	Subil Abraham	Container support on Frontier is now available through the Apptainer container runtime. We will go briefly over what containers are and how they can be useful. We will provide an overview of how to build and run a container on Frontier with Apptainer, as well as specific tips on how...
July 31, 2024	July 2024 OLCF User Conference Call: The ADIOS I/O Framework	Norbert Podhorszki	We present the concepts of parallel I/O in ADIOS, to write and read data in a scalable and portable way, with a declarative approach that is free of manual optimization of I/O in the application source code. We look at the settings some of the largest codes use to avoid...
June 26, 2024	June 2024 OLCF User Conference Call: Linaro Forge	Beau Paisley	In this presentation we will provide an overview of Linaro Forge, a cross platform, integrated environment for debugging and optimizing parallel codes at any scale. We will provide hands-on demonstrations of how Linaro Forge reduces development time, simplifies debugging, and eases application performance enhancement. This talk will highlight using the...
May 9, 2024	May 2024 OLCF User Conference Call: Omnitrace on Frontier	Gina Sitaraman	Omnitrace is AMD's profiling tool for application tracing and analysis. Using several tools and profiling libraries in the backend, Omnitrace provides a holistic view of CPU, GPU and system activity in one profile with information presented at the thread, process and device levels. In this talk, we start with the Ghost...
April 24, 2024	April 2024 OLCF User Conference Call: Fortran 2023 and Beyond	Reuben Budiardja	While it has been around for many decades, Fortran is still the preeminent language suitable for scientific and numerical computation, making up a large share of applications that are running in supercomputing facilities such as OLCF. The latest Fortran standard, informally known as Fortran 2023, was just recently released. In...
March 27, 2024	March 2024 OLCF User Conference Call: NVIDIA NeMo	Janaki Vamaraju, Rohan Rao, Zahra Ronaghi	NVIDIA NeMo is an end-to-end framework to build, customize, and deploy generative AI models across various applications such as speech recognition, natural language processing, and text-to-speech synthesis. It includes training and inferencing frameworks, guardrail toolkits, data curation tools, and pretrained models. This framework supports the training of large-scale models with...
February 28, 2024	February 2024 OLCF User Conference Call: Gordon Bell User Experience Talk	Bikash Kanungo, David Rogers, Sambit Das	Ab initio electronic-structure has presented a dilemma between achievable accuracy and length-scale. Quantum many-body (QMB) methods realize quantum accuracy but fail to scale. Density functional theory (DFT) scales favorably but remains far from quantum accuracy. In this talk, we present a framework that addresses this dilemma by use of three...
January 31, 2024	January 2024 OLCF User Conference Call: First experiences at the exascale with Parthenon	Philipp Grete	On the path to exascale the landscape of computer device architectures and corresponding programming models has become much more diverse. While various low-level performance portable programming models are available, support at the application level lacks behind. To address this issue, we present the performance portable block-structured adaptive mesh refinement (AMR)...
December 6, 2023	December 2023 OLCF User Conference Call: Quantum Computing User Program	Michael Sandoval	The Quantum Computing User Program (QCUP) is managed by the OLCF to provide access to state-of-the-art quantum computing resources. OLCF provides access to a variety of commercial quantum computing resources for purposes of discovery and innovation in scientific computing applications. An overview of the program will be presented.
September 27, 2023	September 2023 OLCF User Conference Call: In Situ Visualization with Ascent	Cyrus Harrison, Nicole Marsaglia	Scientific visualization is a key component of simulation workflows. Visualization tools transform mesh data into pictures that help simulation users digest and understand complex scientific results. Visualization is often done post-hoc using files written to disk, however, at extreme scales that model is strained by gaps between I/O and compute...
August 30, 2023	August 2023 OLCF User Conference Call: Highlighting Frontier Documentation and Usage	Subil Abraham	The Frontier User Guide provides a comprehensive overview of everything you need to know when you start using Frontier. But it is a very dense document with a lot of information. This talk will just give you an overview of the Frontier User Guide and the various topics covered under...
July 26, 2023	July 2023 OLCF User Conference Call: Data Transfer	Suzanne Parete-Koon	As well as providing a general overview of how to transfer data within OLCF, this talk will help you transition from Summit to Frontier by providing details on how to transfer data between Alpine and Orion. Details and best practices of how to use Globus will be given, along with...
June 28, 2023	June 2023 OLCF User Conference Call: Blender on Frontier	Michael Sandoval	Blender is a free open-source software for 3D visualization that is typically used for projects involving 3D modeling, rigging, animation, video games, and VR. Blender has the ability to produce high-quality renders of 3D surfaces and point clouds using Python API, which introduces a niche use case of using Blender...
May 31, 2023	May 2023 OLCF User Conference Call: OLCF Storage – Filesystem Areas, Data Transfer, and Orion Best Practices	Jesse Hanley, Suzanne Parete-Koon	This talk will overview the many areas that OLCF has for storage, and how to move data between them, and give best practices for using the Orion Filesystem.
April 26, 2023	April 2023 OLCF User Conference Call: AI for HPC	Arjun Shankar, Junqi Yin, Wes Brewer	During this call, OLCF's Arjun Shankar, Wes Brewer, and Junqi Yin will give an overview of why AI is useful for HPC simulation campaigns and how it is used at our center (both in the past and currently).
March 29, 2023	March 2023 OLCF User Conference Call: Checkpointing Best Practices for Frontier	Scott Atchley	When running simulations on large-scale systems, encountering a node failure or sudden crash of your compute job is inevitable. Therefore, one of the challenges when running simulations is trying to optimally output “checkpoint” data to avoid having to restart from scratch if you encounter such a scenario. OLCF’s Scott Atchley...
February 22, 2023	February 2023 OLCF User Conference Call: Cybersecurity Best Practices	Ryan Adamson	An overview of cybersecurity best practices for OLCF users.
January 25, 2023	January 2023 OLCF User Conference Call: Containers on Summit	Subil Abraham	Containers are being used more and more in the HPC arena to encapsulate user applications and their associated libraries. This encapsulation makes application builds easily repeatable with minimal effort, greatly reducing the headache of distributing and rebuilding complex HPC applications. Summit now has the capability to build and run containers....