Course on Advanced Programming and Parallel
Computing (F90) - Starting June 11th
As it was advertised in our
February
Newsletter, we are organizing a Course on Advanced Programming and Parallel Computing
(with Fortran 90), which will take place from June 11 to June 25. Details of the course
can be found at the
SIE
Forum. There are still some places available, so if you would like to join,
hurry up and show your interest by replying to the Forum topic or by sending
an e-mail to Ángel de Vicente ().
Intel Fortran and C/C++ Compilers
Licensing terms for the Intel Fortran and C/C++ compilers have changed from previous
versions, which means we are not eligible for either non-commercial or academic
versions anymore. Therefore we bought 2 floating licenses for each compiler, which
will be available shortly for use in both the
Chimera cluster
and in your workstations. If you have computationally demanding code in either
Fortran or C/C++ and you currently use gcc to compile it, you should consider
using the Intel compilers, as performance gains of 30-40% are not unusual.
Get in touch with us if you want more information.
Condor moved to virtual (Xenified) servers.
As you know, the support for Sun machines at the IAC is ending at the end of
July. The
Condor
system at the IAC needs two servers, both of them being serviced
by Sun machines until now. Since we had to move them to a Linux platform,
we decided to go one step further, and both servers are now running
virtualized in just one physical host, thanks to the
Xen
virtual machine monitor. This makes Condor the first production service
at the IAC to run virtualized, thus making maintenance easier and helping
us to save money by requiring less hardware and by decreasing running costs
such as electricity and air conditioning needs. Overall, a win-win situation!
New software packages
The new software packages installed in May are:
- FromRC3,
a Tcl/Tk based tool developed by Leonel Gutierrez to select galaxies from the RC3 catalog according to
redshift, morphological type, coordinates, etc.
- TexMaker,
an open source multiplatform LaTeX development environment written using Qt, quite similar to
Kile.
- SWarp,
a program that resamples and co-adds together FITS images using any arbitrary astrometric projection
defined in the WCS standard.
- QFitsView,
a FITS file viewer similar to SAOimage, DS9, and the like, written using the cross-platform QT library.