High Performance Computing (HPC) events from late 2024¶
2024 has been productive year in the outreach and education of HPC to different schools at Queen Mary University of London. We have formed alliances with different managers and PIs from various schools within the University who understand the value that HPC can add to their scientific research. We are pleased to share our latest event in 2024:
HPC for Bioinformatics¶
On October 3, from 2pm to 5pm, we (Tom Bradford, Vitaly Kukchenkov and I) assisted around 30 students from the Bioinformatics programme. This Masters programme which is delivered by the Biological and Biomedical Sciences and the Computer and Data Science schools, offers access to world-class facilities including high performance computer clusters and specialist genomics technologies.
I started the workshop by arranging of all our ‘bees’ which represent the ‘hive’ in Apocrita, which we use as a representation of our cluster at QMUL. Then, I gave an introduction of what, how, why and when Apocrita is useful for intensive computing with a heavy load of data. Tom Bradford presented a selection of practical tasks prepared by the ITSR the team. Vitaly Kukchenkov provided support in the accessing of Apocrita using the SSH application and protocol. The students mostly completed the material in Desktops at the QMUL lab, and on their personal laptops. We received valuable feedback from the students including more training in Linux to manage files in Apocrita. Here is a selfie with the audience holding our bees, I am holding Crisbee, one of our mascot of Apocrita.
HPC for the Wolfson Institute of Population Health¶
On October 17, from 2pm to 5pm at Dept W 1.20 and 1.21, Dr. Garth Fuston requested HPC training for 10 researchers of the Wolfson Institute of Population Health. I was responsible for explaining the basics of Apocrita and submitting HPC jobs using the terminal and OnDemand.
Most of the users had Windows and MacOS on their laptops, so I also covered Linux commands to use Apocrita properly. This group was engaged with the basics but productive activities provided during the workshop. We also enjoyed a lovely coffee break. I owe a big thank you to Peter Lock for helping me set up displays for the workshop, as well as giving assistance to help our users manage activities during the workshop. A quiz was given at the end of the workshop to evaluate the level of knowledge acquired by the attendees. We had a female winner! I encouraged this group and some previous users to read our official documentation HPC@QMUL.
First HPC@QMUL Annual Users Meeting¶
On November 28, from 9am to 5pm, the first HPC@QMUL Annual Users Meeting was held at the BLOC in Arts Building. We had 12 brilliant speakers who presented their outstanding research using Apocrita. These PhDs, and post-doctoral researchers from different schools gathered to share their experiences with the cluster in their individual areas of study, making this event quite interesting. It served to highlight the versatility of Apocrita.
We had two coffee breaks, and lunch was provided to presenters. Personally, I felt so excited to see all these experts having not only skills in HPC and in their own fields but also speaking and presentations skills. They are the full package!
This event was made possible by the support from our managers Tom King and our CIO of QMUL, Rachel Bence who are very aware of the importance and the impact of the cluster in different subjects. We were very pleased that some of our presenters are prominent scientists which their projects have been recognised by institutions such ACM and NASA.
This experience made me very thankful that we have the opportunity to do the work we are doing with HPC at the university. One of the outcomes of this meeting was that we now have the opportunity to welcome more volunteers for helping newcomers to future workshops.
Please see the video with a compilation of our journey.
I am planning to organise more than 20 events in 2025 for QMUL. I end 2024 with a feeling of great satisfaction for all we accomplished at QMUL. Wishing you all a good break. See you next year!