1st SimLab Porting Workshop

From 9 - 11 June, the JSC Simulation Laboratories organized a Porting Workshop to promote HPC activities within their respective scientific communities. About half of the 26 selected participants were either researchers from Forschungszentrum Jülich or students at the GRS, while the other half came from other German labs and universities. Their scientific profiles matched one of the research fields covered by the four SimLabs: Biology, Climate, Molecular Systems, and Plasma Physics. Although the participants were distributed quite evenly across the SimLabs, the HPC expertise and experience varied widely from group to group.

The programme included a combination of lectures and hands-on sessions held largely by JSC SimLab staff members. Tutorial lectures on advanced computational methods for HPC provided an opportunity for the SimLabs to present their activities and scientific expertise. Complementary hands-on sessions covered a wide range of practical issues, including accessing the systems, compiling and executing jobs, single core optimization, JUGENE’s torus network, and usage of HPC tools. Additional contributions came from three invited speakers: Frank Schmitz (KIT) presented an overview of the current SimLab status at KIT, while Paolo Carloni (GRS) and Maxim Fedorov (MPI Leipzig) reviewed topical HPC challenges in biology and molecular systems respectively. All tutorial talks and exercises are freely available at the workshop’s webpage: http://www.fz-juelich.de/jsc/simlab-porting-workshop

Finally, the workshop concluded with round-table discussions within each SimLab group about current supercomputing issues particular to each discipline. Overall the meeting proved to be a highly effective community outreach event and generated invaluable feedback for a planned call for high-level HPC support to be announced by JSC later this year.

(Contact: Dr. Paul Gibbon, ext. 1499)

from JSC News No. 186, 24 June 2010