New additions to the IAC Supercomputing family
The IAC Supercomputing resources' list keeps growing. The latest additions
are two computers of a very different nature. rucio is our newest
"burro", i.e. a machine with plenty of memory (16 GB of RAM), for
those with small computational but big memory needs. LaPalma is, as you most
probably already know, the 512 CPUs Supercomputer located at our CALP. But
what are these good for? How do you use them? Just read on....
SIEminar: "Supercomputing resources at the
IAC" - 4 December, 12:30
As mentioned above, the list of Supercomputing resources at the IAC is
growing. OK, it is not immense, but there is certainly a variety of resources
that you, as a researcher at the IAC, can make use of: the burros (machines
with a lot of RAM); the Condor high throughput computing system; the
distributed memory clusters (Chimera and LaPalma); the ULL shared memory
cluster Tarja; and others, not yet in production, but whose deployment at the
IAC will depend on future needs (for example, GPGPUs, BOINC, Grids, etc.). In
this talk we will give you a summary of all these resources, what are they
good for, how you can use them, etc. Don't miss it!
SIE's software courses/talks poll
One of the missions
of the SIE de Investigación y Enseñanza is to organize
talks and
courses on software and programming topics. The courses given this year,
such as "Introduction to PHP+MySQL" and "Advanced Programming
and Parallel Computing", have raised quite some interest, and some
people have already inquired about or suggested further courses on software
packages such as IRAF or IDL, or programming languages (C/C++, F90, etc.),
which we can try to organize provided there are enough people willing to
attend. So, if you are interested in some of these courses, please speak up
by filling in this
very
simple and quick form. We look forward to your answer! The results of the
poll will be published in the next SIENews issue.
LIRISDR and other packages updates
The IRAF external package LIRISDR, developed here at the IAC, has been
updated to version 2.7. The changes with respect to previous versions can be
found by typing, whitin iraf:
type
lirisdr$relv2p7.txt. It is recommended to do an
unlearn LIRISDR to avoid parameter conflicts with the
older version. As LIRISDR is growing in popularity and usage, it has been
promoted and placed among the top-level packages (those that are listed when
you launch IRAF). Please report any questions or suggestions to Jose Acosta
(). We have also updated
the
HEAsoft
package to v6.3.2;
Fv,
the interactive FITS file editor, to v5.0, and the image display
DS9
to v5.0.
Seminar by the SIC: "Massive Data Storage"
(a.k.a. Data Storage, done the right way!) - 11 December, 12:30
Chances are that at some point you have lost some data due to hard disk
failure. If this is the case you have learnt, the hard way, that storage
media are not as reliable as we would like them to be. Data is one of the
main assets of our "business", so you just cannot
hope
that your hard disk will be OK. Instead, you should be using
professional-grade systems with high read/write speeds and with near-zero
chances of data loss, which is precisely the type of system that we now have
at the IAC. If you value your data, make sure you come to the Seminar that
Antonio Díaz Chinea and Justo Luna López will be giving about
it.