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SIENews

The newsletter of the SIE de Investigación y Enseñanza N. 35 - March/April 2010

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.
SIE de Investigación y Enseñanza :: N. 35 - March/April 2010 - Contact: