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The newsletter of the SIE de Investigación y Enseñanza and the Servicios Informáticos N. 3 - October 2022

Ángel de Vicente and Isaac Alonso Asensio have joined the SIE

After passing with flying colors last year the exams for the Técnico superior especializado de apoyo a la investigación (~ specialized senior technician for supporting research) position, they have received the formal appointment from the State Secretariat for Public Service, and thus last July they have joined the SIE de Investigación y Enseñanza. Ángel started his work at the IAC in 2003, when he joined the SIE as a support postdoc, to participate in many aspects related to the development and implementation of supercomputing facilities at the IAC, most notably the installation of sthe HTCondor queue system. In 2011 he moved to a postdoctoral research position in solar astrophysics. Isaac joined the IAC in 2018 as a PhD student, working on extending a GPU-accelerated N-body code to perform simulations of galaxy formation and evolution. He is now finishing writing his thesis and preparing its defense. Their knowledge and experience in supercomputing will be of great benefit to all the IAC researchers.

Supercomputing statistics for the 1st semester of 2022

HTCondor has seen a sharp decrease in its usage in the first semester of 2022, consuming a total of about 430.000 CPU hours (compared to 1.225.00 in the second half of 2021), which means that about 97 slots were used by HTCondor, 17% of all available slots. See the graphics in HTCondor statistics page.
The LaPalma3 supercomputer registers, in the first semester of 2022, about 5.400.000 hours used by IAC researchers, and 5.530.000 by the RES. The same figures for the 2nd semester of 2021 were 4.310.000 and 5.910.000 CPU hours respectively. As for TeideHPC, IAC users consumed about 1.362.000 CPU hours, twice as much as the CPU hours for the second semester of last year (672.000). Statistics for both LaPalma3 and TeideHPC are availble in the LaPalma3 and TeideHPC statistics page.
The "diva" server, bought by the Severo Ochoa projects in 2017, but available to all IAC users independently of the research group they belong to, shows a total of about 453.000 hours. Since diva has 192 cores, it means that about 55% of the core were running jobs on average, with about 45% of the cores idle (as diva uses the slurm queue system, it does not run HTCondor jobs).

Dardo and diodo, old "burros", have been retired

In line with the efforts by the IAC to improve its energy sustainability, we have turned off our oldest "burros" (as our computing servers are affectionately called), namely diodo and dardo. They were almost 15 years old, and computationally inefficient compared with the newest Linux machines. Those users who were using either server can now use our public burros, dejar and denso. We would also like to remind you that from denso, deimos and diva you can access a scratch area of about 700 TB (path is /storage/scratch) where you can keep those files that you use/access less frequently, instead of storing them in the main scratch disk, much more limited in capacity, with the risk of filling it up.

Computer accessories for loan

In the SIE office (MOB-DES.12) we have some computer accessories either for handing out, or for short-term loan. In particular, we have a bunch of USB keyboards with english layout (see the picture), and stickers to convert to English a Spanish-layout keyboard, especially useful for laptops. We also have some external, compact hard disks (the Western Digital My Passport type), 4 or 5 TB in capacity, as well as some USB-C multiport adapters, with ethernet, HDMI and USB ports. Both hard disks and adapters are for short-term loans only (a few weeks at most); if you plan to use them for a longer time you should buy the items you need with your project's funds.

SIE de Investigación y Enseñanza :: N. 3 - October 2022 - Contact: