Going to the HPC-SIG 2023

On Thursday, June 13, I attended the HPC-SIG meeting at the University of Bath which hosted many High Performance Computing (HPC) specialists in the UK. The event was hybrid, so there were international attendees as well as those from the UK.

There were a variety of presentations that addressed both the technical and the management/strategic perspectives of HPC. It was apparent that most of us face the same challenges in relation to storage, sharing data, data protection, power saving, and knowledge sharing of the Linux and High Performance Computing topics that have a great financial impact on each center or institute.

One of the presentations that I remember was about the need for good hiring practices in the High Performance Computing area in order to ensure that one hires individuals with the proper training and expertise. It seems that there are a number of people that apply to positions in HPC without knowing the requirements needed to be successful in the field. I had the opportunity to give a Lightning Talk to present the High Performance Computing team and activities at QMUL.

One of the open source software programs that most institutes are lately using in the field of HPC is Open On Demand, we use this at QMUL. The most popular talks (in my eyes, for the number of questions) were related to Spank and WIPP. The main dish of the event was the one about ARCHER in EPCC. In his presentation, Andy Turner also discussed the upgrade reasons such as security updates, access to more recent compilers, software libraries and tools; and the changes to bind paths and library paths for Singularity with MPI, among others novel aspects of power saving.

Big thanks to the organizers and to the Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) for covering my expenses. It was most enjoyable for me to meet new fellow HPC professionals.

Title image: Official Website of the group HPC -SIG