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The Arctic Region Supercomputing Center is proud to announce the first aWards Of the center's new Postdoctoral Fellowship Program. We have filled eight positions, and you're invited to read more about this program, and the eight post-docs at:
http://www.arsc.edu/news/archive/postdoc_awards.html
This article is early notice that ARSC will resume daily automated purging of the $WRKDIR file systems, on October 31, 2005. ARSC is lengthening its traditional purge period of 10 days three-fold, to 30 days. Commencing October 31st, the purger will run every day, and each day, files which haven't been accessed in 30 or fewer days will be deleted.
The goals of purging include freeing up disk space and improving disk performance. (It was news to the editor, but file access times, on the same physical disk, can vary by 30% or more, and old files tend to accumulate on the fastest parts of the disk.)
The resumption of purging means a number of things, not limited to the following:
For purging, the "age" of a file is based on its last "access" time, not its last "modification" time. For instance, data files read as input by your HPC application are considered to have been "accessed" every time they're read, even if you change them only on rare occasions.
The command "ls -ul" shows time of "access". ("ls -l" shows time of modification. See "man ls.") You might play around with "ls -ul" a bit...
You are (and always have been) responsible for protecting data on $WRKDIR. It has never been backed-up.
If you have valuable data, code, or other files on $WRKDIR, and you have not backed them up lately, this is a great time. "Tar" them up and send to $ARCHIVE.
We recommend against "gzipping" files destined for $ARCHIVE, as gzip takes much longer than the file transfer itself and, when your file is moved to tape on $ARCHIVE, it is automatically compressed in hardware, anyway.
We do recommend making "tar" files, as it takes much longer to store and retrieve multiple small files than one larger file.
ARSC will provide tools to show you which of your files will be subject to deletion on a given day.
If you have unique requirements which will be difficult to meet once purging is resumed, please feel free to contact ARSC Consulting. Similarly, we will be available to discuss any questions or concerns you may have about this.
--
Please watch your email, the MOTD, and "news" items for more information.
[ Thanks to Dr. Greg Newby of ARSC for this report! ]
From August 22 to 24, 2005, experts from around the country participated in a symposium and workshop on high-performance reconfigurable computing at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. This event was organized and sponsored by ARSC, and highlighted ARSC's early involvement in the utilization of field programmable gate array (FPGA) technology in high-performance computing.
FPGAs are part of ARSC's new Cray XD1 computer ("nelchina"), which has been undergoing evaluation and early use during summer 2005. With the involvement of Dr. Tarek El-Ghazawi of the George Washington University, as well as several of Dr. El-Ghazawi's doctoral students who spent the summer at ARSC, an extensive knowledge base of the promise of FPGAs for high-performance computing is being developed.
The symposium consisted of two days of presentations and panel discussions. Presentations themes included:
After two days of symposium events, many attendees participated in a one-day hands-on workshop addressing utilization FPGAs. This workshop was taught by Greg Woods of Cray, Inc. and utilized ARSC's XD1 system.
For more information about the symposium, visit:
http://www.arsc.edu/news/archive/FPGA.html
Stay tuned for future announcements on the XD1 and related ARSC events.
Due to overwhelming interest in the Matlab training that was offered this summer, ARSC is planning to have Mathworks return to UAF for more training in the near future. In preparation, we would like to ask anyone that is interested to take a minute to answer the following short list of questions.
Your answers will help us understand what will best serve the Matlab users across the campus.
Please copy these questions into an email message and send your reply to Tom Logan at: logan@arsc.edu
--
1) Assuming that multi-day Matlab classes are offered this fall (before
the end of the semester), which of these would you be more likely to
attend:
___ Weekday AM only training
___ Weekday PM only training
___ Weekday All day training
___ Weekend training
___ Can not attend training during the semester
2) Which of these topics are of interest to you?
___ MATLAB Fundamentals and Programming Techniques
___ Advanced MATLAB Programming Techniques
___ MATLAB for Building Graphical User Interfaces
___ Integrating MATLAB with External Applications
___ Statistical Methods in MATLAB
___ Simulink for System and Algorithm Modeling
___ MATLAB and Simulink for Control Design Acceleration
___ MATLAB for Signal Processing
___ MATLAB for Image Processing
(Detailed course descriptions are at:
http://www.mathworks.com/services/training/courses/index.html)
3) Do you have other comments/concerns/suggestions about the scheduling
or content of any Matlab training that may be offered at ARSC?
---
Again, please send your response to Tom Logan at: logan@arsc.edu
A:[[ Here's a Fortran DO loop and a print statement:
[[
[[ DO I = N, M, L
[[ ...
[[ ENDDO
[[
[[ PRINT*, "Value of I, after the loop terminates: ", I
[[
[[ Assuming the loop executes all iterations specified (e.g., it doesn't
[[ contain any "EXIT" statements), can you precompute the value which will
[[ be printed for I? And it is?
Something to remember about Fortran DO loops: the final value of the
iterator ("I" in the example) is a value never used in the body of the
loop. On each iteration, it's compared against the termination value
("M"), and if it's out of range according to the sign of the increment
("L"), the body is skipped and the loop exited.
Thus, I = 102 on exit from this loop:
DO I = 2, 100, 2
...
ENDDO
And, I = 39 on exit from this loop:
DO I = 50, 40, -1
...
ENDDO
For "normal" cases this formula provides the desired value:
I = N + (( M - N + L ) / L ) * L
However, this doesn't account for loops which execute zero times, like
this example, which would exit with I = 50:
DO I = 50, 40, 1
...
ENDDO
Q: Here are two lines extracted from a C program (could just as easily
be a Fortran example):
-------------------------------------------------------
n = VALUE_OF_N;
#ifdef VERBOSE
-------------------------------------------------------
Here's a two line makefile to compile the program:
-------------------------------------------------------
prog:
cc -D VALUE_OF_N=$(NNN) -D VERBOSE prog.c
-------------------------------------------------------
Here's how you could "make" this, specifying the ultimate value of
"VALUE_OF_N" (and thus, of "n" as well) on the command line:
-------------------------------------------------------
$ make NNN=1000
-------------------------------------------------------
And, finally, here's my question. Is there a way to define or
undefine the macro "VERBOSE" (which takes no value) from the make
command line? I want something like the following, which I know is
incorrect:
$ make NNN=1000 -D VERBOSE
[[ Answers, Questions, and Tips Graciously Accepted ]]
Contact:
Thomas J. Baring ARSC Web Specialist ph: 907-450-8619 Donald Bahls ARSC User Consultant ph: 907-450-8674 Arctic Region Supercomputing Center University of Alaska Fairbanks PO Box 756020 Fairbanks AK 99775-6020
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