July 2023 - Physics-Departmental-Computing

Juan Villamil - for onward cascade to your teams
by David Colling 28 Jul '23

28 Jul '23

Hi All, Just in case some of you may not have seen this ... Best, david From: Kerse, Robert W <r.kerse(a)imperial.ac.uk> Sent: Thursday, July 27, 2023 4:59 PM To: Kerse, Robert W <r.kerse(a)imperial.ac.uk> Subject: Juan Villamil - for onward cascade to your teams Dear Colleagues We would like to inform you that our Chief Information Officer, Juan Villamil, will be departing from Imperial College on July 31, 2023. Since joining Imperial in February 2020, Juan has played a pivotal role in advancing our technology infrastructure, driving our digital transformation efforts, and bolstering our cyber security measures. Throughout his tenure, Juan's expertise and leadership have been instrumental in fostering innovation, implementing key technology initiatives, and strengthening our cyber security framework. He has made significant contributions to enhancing our information systems, improving efficiency, and ensuring the protection of our digital assets. Under Juan's guidance, we successfully navigated the challenges brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. His dedication and strategic vision were critical in ensuring a seamless transition to remote work and virtual learning environments, while maintaining robust cyber security practices to safeguard our data and systems. I hope you will join me in thanking him for his contribution and wishing him well in his future endeavours. We will shortly commence our search for a replacement Chief Information Officer. Robert Kerse Chief Operating Officer

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Follow up action on me.
by David Colling 14 Jul '23

14 Jul '23

Dear All, There was an action on me to follow up on Jenny's comments that her team's jobs were running very very slowly at the moment, even though they are not parallel jobs and don't require GPUs. I asked Andy Richards about this and his reply was along the lines of parallel jobs have been moved to cx3 where they have been running (very inefficiently) and blocking the queues for all other users. They may have been running inefficiently but at least they do run. These jobs will move over to the new resources in the not too distant future. However, even when these jobs are moved to the new cluster we have a lack of throughput capacity. This will be looked at when the true HPC jobs have been moved to the new resource. I believe that Andy is on this list and so he should feel free to correct me if I have been inaccurate. Best, david

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Next Physics Departmental meeting
by David Colling 11 Jul '23

11 Jul '23

Hi All, My apologies for sending this mail a little later than I hoped. The clear favourite date is 11th (i.e. next Tuesday), which is the day before the FRCC which is fine. This will be our usual timing of 12->13:00. The meeting will be mixed. I have booked 532 for those in college and I will ask somebody with an outlook calendar to create a teams invitation. We still have no deputy for Tim to represent Theory - any nominations Tim? Please send me your items for the agenda so that I can circulate it at the end of this week. The items that I have in mind are: - Status of the HPC upgrade. - General News from ICT (including the service des - Securing college devices - Mailman (and its demise) - Communication channels between ICT and the Department(s) - The unified Windows build across teaching machines. - RSEs in Physics (and FoNS) - ... Many of which will also be discussed at the at the FRCC the following day. Please do send me any additional items. This is clearly quite a full agenda but I will try to keep it to the point. Best, david

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Important if you use UG computers for teaching (including labs)
by David Colling 06 Jul '23

06 Jul '23

Dear All, If you don't use any UG computers for teaching and don't plan to for the next year then you can stop reading now - which I suspect is most of you. Otherwise, please read on. We have been trying to get a common build for all the windows machines used in UG teaching for a number of years. This would mean that all the computers could be used for all the different activities and we wouldn't need to have "that set of computers set aside for instrumentation and these microprocessors". The means that we are installing all the required software and drivers on all the machines. ICT have now built 4 machines with this new configuration. The plan is that we test these 4 machines and give ICT feedback on around the two week timescale. ICT then make any alterations that we need and then roll it out over all the computers on level 3 and in the UG labs in plenty of time for the start of term. ###################### the important bit ############################## So if you use computers for UG teaching then you are strongly encouraged to make sure that the things you want to do work on these 4 machines. Even if you think that what you want is pretty trivial. If you don't try it and when it comes to term time, what you want doesn't work then ... These machines can be found on the back row (nearest the window) of the microprocessor lab (Blackett 418). Ivan tells me that he has labelled them so they should be easy to find. If you need lab equipment to test them then please contact Graham and the team and they will be happy to help. Please test them and give me any feedback in the next two weeks so (say) by 22nd July. ######################################################################## Best, david

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