My apologies - I'm on holiday next week.

But here's a item from EXSS / people I work with:-

####

The RCS service changed the queues for the college HPC quite considerably at the end of March 2022. It also seems that our jobs are now defaulting to run on an AMD EPYC platform, which doesn't offer as much 'bang for your buck' per CPU core, yet a lot of our scientific codes do not scale with the number of cores beyond a 'sweet spot'.

Since then, PhD students and PDRAs have reported very long wait times for their jobs to run, and quite unsatisfactory performance. The ramifications of these changes haven't been particularly well communicated (and generally, I'd state that the running of the queues is quite opaque from the point of view of a user), but it seems that as well as updating things, there has been a general shift in resources from the batch running queues (that power computational projects, and PhDs) to interactive queues such as the Jupyterhub (which are mainly used by undergraduates).

Could we get some feedback on whether these extended wait times / job backlog have been noticed, and request that more information / transparency is sent out to the RCS users?

Over the next few years, what is the intended investment in new hardware for the RCS?

Should we just accept that these queues are slow from now on & seek national HPC resources? Or will the situation change?

####

Best wishes,

Jarv

On Thu, 9 Jun 2022 at 18:30, David Colling <d.colling@imperial.ac.uk> wrote:

Hi All,

Tuesday is clearly the most popular day (sorry Kyle - if you want to
send a deouty just let me know). As I say my plan is to have it both on
teams and in person. Please let me know if you wish to attend remotely.

Best,
david

On 08/06/2022 12:49, David Colling wrote:
> Dear All,
>
> There is a FoNS Research Computing Committee meeting the afternoon a
> week today. I try to have a Physics Computing Committee meeting the week
> before so that we can propagate any items up to the FRCC. We
> traditionally meet at lunchtime so I have set up a doodle poll at:
>
> https://doodle.com/meeting/participate/id/bY6WXWKd
>
> Please can you fill it in asap so that we can set a date - my apologies
> for the very short notice - I will try to give more notice next time
> which will be early October. I will try to book a physical room as well
> as being virtual - so mixed mode.
>
> Please ask the members of your research groups for items that they would
> like to bring to this group. I have found out that at least one member
> of the research community, who is a large computing user, didn't know
> that our committee exists. We really rely on the representatives of the
> research groups to make these connections. We are quite an informal
> group and so if a group wants more than one representative then that is
> fine and some already do. So please send me agenda items. The agenda
> items that I want to cover (in no particular order at he moment) include:
>
> - Usual update from ICT - may be also an update from Leigh on how the
> service desk is (hopefully) improving.
> - Teaching machine set up (including support for Linux in a OneDrive
> only universe)
> - ICT supported laptops.
> - Publishing research data - results from the recent survey and what
> will help physics most.
> - RSE support from the department. What would be best structure for
> physics. I have spoken to quite a few of you about this recently and
> there are few variations as to how this might work.
> - Back in the day we used to have a round up from each group -is there
> any point bringing this back? I suspect not but would be interested in
> other people's opinions.
>
> Please send suggestions for other items.
>
>
> Best,
> david
>
>
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