Summer School in Scientific and High-Performance
Computing
In collaboration with HPC-Europa2, the CSC from Finland is organizing a Summer
School in Scientific and High-Performance Computing which might be of interest
to some of you. The venue is stunning, the program is well balanced and the
price is right. If you want to know more, please check all the details in their
webpage.
If you decide to go, please let us know.
Parallel code development in your
workstation
If you end up going to the Summer School organized by CSC, you will probably
want to develop and test your own MPI codes. Our clusters are oriented towards
production runs and are not good platforms for code development, but with
the PGI compilers (for which the IAC has licenses), you can test MPI codes
easily in your workstation. You can read more information about this in the
Portland
Group website.
Condor to have a facelift in 2010
The
IAC
Condor pool is a great resource for our research (in the last semester
of 2009 it delivered more CPUhours than
LaPalma and
Diodo(formerly
Chimera) together), but it was showing signs of its age, so during 2010 we
are giving it an important facelift. So far, we have updated the Condor version
(to the latest stable one: 7.4.1) and have reinstalled the Condor server. At
the same time, we are experimenting with many of its new features, which we
will inform about via the
Condor@IAC
mailing list.
Software packages migration to 64-bit
As you all probably already know, we managed to get rid of the obsoleting
RHEL4, 32bit Linux installations, and all desktop PCs have now Fedora-8 64bit.
We are currently migrating all the astronomical software packages installed
in the software servers to 64bit: in most cases they must be recompiled from
source, in some others the appropriate binaries downloaded and installed.
The process is not quite over yet: for instance some big packages such us
Python and Starlink need additional work, but we expect to be able to finish
it in a couple of weeks or so. Further info, particularly about significant
usage changes or modifications you may need to do to your Unix environment,
will be given in due time.
VO School at IAC: summary, webcasts
and step-by-step tutorials
A couple of weeks ago the "Second Practical Course of the SVO network" took
place here at the IAC, with about 40 people attending. We learned hands-on
how to use VO-oriented tools such as
Aladin,
TOPCAT,
VOPLOT
and others, and how to do exciting science using all the data available in the "Virtual
Observatory". The participants gave several interesting comments and
suggestions on how to improve the software tools and also the format of the
tutorials. Many thanks are due to the organizers: Jorge and Ismael, and to
the lecturers: Enrique, Fran, Miriam and Raul, from the Spanish Virtual Observatory.
If you missed this course, do not despair: the
webcasts
of all sessions are already available, and if you wish to practice
yourself you can try any of the
Fully
developed example Science Cases.