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Welcome to the QMUL HPC blog

  • in rse
  • 10 min read

Pythonic Parallel Processing for HPC: Your Gauss is as good as mine

There are many strategies and tools for improving the performance of Python code, for a comprehensive treatment see High Performance Python by Gorelick and Ozsvald (institutional access is available to QM staff). However, there are some subtleties when using them in an HPC environment. More bluntly, requesting processor cores does not automatically mean your code will use them effectively, and that cannot happen if it doesn't know how many of them there are!

  • in rse
  • 12 min read

Intel Inspector 2022.2 on Apocrita

As the complexity of HPC applications increases, the management of memory and threading scopes becomes increasingly important. Tools like Intel Inspector are crucial in this context, to effectively identify and resolve a wide array of memory errors and thread synchronisation issues.

Creating and Using Private Modules

Modules are the centralised method of accessing different software on an HPC cluster. By using a variety of modules you can quickly and easily access different versions of applications and create work flows that suit particular projects. The modules offered on Apocrita cover a wide range of applications but there will always be situations that require something unusual or a relatively niche version of a piece of software.

  • in news
  • 3 min read

Modules Update December 2022

Since the last module update in December 2021, we have:

  • added/moved 84 modules to production
  • added 9 modules to the development environment
  • deprecated 5 modules
  • deleted 12 modules
  • in tutorial
  • 4 min read

Speeding Up Grep Searches

Sometimes you may find yourself needing to filter a large amount of output using the grep command. However, grep can sometimes struggle when you try to filter files with an incredibly large number of lines, as it loads each line into RAM line-by-line. This can mean you can quickly exhaust even large amounts of requested RAM. There are a few ways around this.

  • in tutorial
  • 4 min read

R Tutorial Part Two - R vs RStudio

Following up from part one of our R tutorial we'll be taking a look at the differences between R - the command-line language which can be loaded as a module and used in your Apocrita batch jobs - and Rstudio - the graphical development environment, accessed via a web server and provided via the OnDemand service.

R Tutorial Part One - Top Tips

The ITSR support team often receive tickets from R users that cover similar ground. So we thought we would collate our most frequent responses into some "Top Tips"! The tips below apply equally to Rscript but this article only covers the interactive R program.

  • in news
  • 3 min read

Migrating to a new research storage system

As the current 2 PetaByte Research Data Storage on Apocrita reaches end of life this summer, we have procured a new storage system, providing 5PB of capacity. This means faster, bigger and cheaper storage for you, the researcher! Read on to discover the benefits...but first, an important notice.

  • in rse
  • 2 min read

RSE team activities up to June 2022

The RSE team in ITS Research has had a busy few years since we started sharing our work in this blog. In this post we look at some highlights of recent activity and what we have to look forward to.