More than a million CPU hours, 1,038,114.54 to be exact, have been used by HTCondor in the second semester of 2023. This is the fifth highest mark, for a single semester, since 2006 (the record is held by 2011 S2, with 1,640,000 CPU hours - see the HTCondor usage summary since 2006). By the way, with the recent addition of a couple of new burros, the HTCondor pool comprises now 1600+ slots.
As for the LaPalma Supercomputer, in 2023 S2 8.25 million CPU hours
from the IAC quota were used, basically the same number as in 2023 S1,
while RES CPU hours have halved in S2 compared to S1. Overall,
27.3 million CPU hours were used in 2023, a ~15% increase over the
same figure for 2022.
Last semester several burros, among them diva and deimos, have been upgraded to Ubuntu 22.04, and at the same time they have been integrated into the general pool of public Linux servers using the Slurm queueing system. For this reason, no meaningful statistical data are available for diva/deimos usage. We plan to publish usage data for the whole Slurm pool for the first semester of 2024 as soon as they become available.
A new Web application has been set up to view module usage in real time. For instance, to check the usage for year 2023 (data start from March 2023, when the tracking of modules usage began), see:
Last January, the Community Science and Data Center (CSDC) and the US National Gemini Office (US NGO) at NSF's NOIRLab launched the new NOIRLab IRAF v2.18. The main goal of this release was "to provide a stable, fast, reliable, and accessible data reduction option to Gemini users while new and modern software is being developed for all facility instruments and modes."
The most important change with respect to previous IRAF versions is that v2.18 includes binaries for Linux and for Mac (both Intel and ARM CPUs), so that you can run IRAF natively on a Mac, without the hassle of installing a Docker container or a Linux virtual machines. Note though that it comes with a limited implementation of the STSDAS package, with only those tasks needed for the Gemini reduction package.
If you want to run IRAF on your Mac, or want to reduce and analyse GEMINI data, we encourage you to install this new IRAF release. Further information, as well as installation and configuration instructions, can be found at https://iraf.noirlab.edu/.
Last December, IDL v9.0 was released, and has been installed on all Ubuntu 22.04 desktops and "burros". The most important development is that now IDL runs natively on an Apple silicon (M-series) Mac, with significantly improved performances with respect to the x86_64 Intel binaries running under the Rosetta emulation layer. For more details, please visit the IDL 9.0 Release Notes & What's New web page.
If you just upgrade IDL to v9.0 on a laptop where you were running a previous IDL version, with a node-locked licence, the installation process should automatically recognise the existing licence and update it. Alternatively, you can use one of the many available floating licenses, which works insofar you are connected, directly or via VPN, to the IAC network. Get in touch with us to learn how to set this up.
plusFORT, from Polyhedron Solutions, is a "multi-purpose suite of tools for analyzing and improving Fortran programs. It combines restructuring and reformatting with global static analysis, dynamic analysis and many other features in a single powerful package."
If you are a Fortran programmer, and want to modernize your code and make it better structured and more efficient, you can use the tools included in plusFORT. More details can be found in the plusFORT website. Until December 2023 one had to pay a licence fee to use this software package; starting this year, its usage is "Free for personal, educational and academic users working on non-commercial projects." (a scope which we think includes the typical usage here at the IAC).
To use it, load first the corresponding module:
module load plusfort/8.04
Shortly, the goya machine that served the old IAC Intranet, http://goya.ll.iac.es/, will be turned off. Over several years the SI have been transferring and updating all the content that was on that website to the current https://www.iac.es/ (with validation). For any question, please contact with the SI (common computer services). Read here the full text.
On a related note, for about 20 years we (SIE) have been maintaining the
tele
command, which allows you to find the phone number of any
IAC employee. In its latest implementation, it retrieved the
information from a table published on the Goya web server and,
after some simple string manipulation, printed the results on the
terminal. At one time we even tried to remove it, when the new
CISCO phones were installed, since they already include the IAC
phone directory, but vigorous protest by several users made us
reconsider such decision. Now that goya is being turned off,
we have replaced the old "tele" command with a new Python-based script,
which obtains the data directly from SAP, and presents them in a
much nicer format. Try it!