ARCC to Hire Undergraduate Student

Details

Written by Jamie Schnaitter Jamie Schnaitter

Published: 22 December 2019 22 December 2019

• jobs
• open positions
• hiring

Greetings,

The Advanced Research Computing Center (ARCC) in research park is looking to hire an undergraduate student to help with our high performance computing (HPC) resources. In the first few months, the student will be responsible for helping the ARCC build, configure, and optimize scientific visualization software and setup remote visualization capabilities. After that project is complete, the student will help resolve problems for users, investigate issues related to the management and performance of our clusters, build & optimize software packages for the clusters, work to improve our documentation, and get hands-on experience with HPC specific hardware and software. Candidates should have experience with the GNU/Linux operating system, including scripting and standard methods for building software in UNIX-like environments. Special consideration will be given to students with experience running parallel and distributed programs, as well experience with scientific visualization tools.

For more information about the position, please contact R. Paul Wiegand ( w...@ist.ucf.edu (Click on "..." to reveal the address)) or Glenn Martin ( m...@ist.ucf.edu (Click on "..." to reveal the address)). For more information about the ARCC and its resources, please see our home page.

Thank You,
R. Paul Wiegand
Glenn Martin

Changes due to ARCC Fall 2019 Maintenance Cycle

Details

Written by R. Paul Wiegand R. Paul Wiegand

Published: 19 December 2019 19 December 2019

Stokes and Newton have returned to operation four days early! Please remember that we have two such scheduled maintenance downtimes per year, one after Fall term (the one we just completed) and one after Spring term.

Please take a moment to read over the changes:

1. We upgraded our resource manager, SLURM, to version 19.05.4. The new version has much better GPU support. We will be revising our documentation online soon to show how to take advantage of these features. Until then, here is more information: https://slurm.schedmd.com/SLUG19/GPU_Scheduling_and_Cons_Tres.pdf
2. Singularity support was deployed on both clusters. Singularity is a container service like Docker (and has the ability to run Docker images). To run singularity, just load the singularity/singularity-3.5.2-go-1.13.5 module! Again, we will be rolling out improved documentation in the coming weeks to explain how to use this. Until then, here is more information: https://sylabs.io/guides/3.5/user-guide/
3. The module system (lmod) was upgraded, and its configuration was changed so that the module hierarchy will be cached. This should improve latencies when using the 'ml' and 'module' commands, including during login.
4. We upgraded our NVIDIA GPU drivers to the latest versions and made the CUDA 10.2 module available to users.
5. We completed internal tool configuration changes, as well as our regular benchmarking of the compute, file system, and network performance. All show the clusters operating as expected.

We appreciate your patience and wish you the best with your research!

Fall Maintenance cycle downtime, Dec 15 - Dec 22

Details

Written by R. Paul Wiegand R. Paul Wiegand

Published: 22 November 2019 22 November 2019

• downtime
• maintenance

Stokes and Newton will be taken down per our bi-annual routine maintenance cycle during mid-December. Specifically, the clusters will be unavailable from Sunday, December 15 through Sunday, December 22.

The primary objectives during this downtime is to upgrade SLURM and our module system.

Recall that we now routinely bring the system down twice a year, once in late Fall and once in late Spring. We will keep the users notified in advance of such downtimes, but we recommend you build such expectations into your workflow. Though we anticipate no data loss during this time, it's never a bad idea to backup your materials. So we suggest you use this opportunity to copy salient data and code off of Stokes and Newton prior to the downtime.