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September 2024 Maintenance Details

Kristen Finch

Kristen Finch

HPC Staff Scientist

Hello Hyak Community,

Thanks again for your patience with our monthly scheduled maintenance. During this maintenance session, we were able to provide package updates to node images to ensure compliance with the latest operating system level security fixes and performance optimizations. Of note, the Nvidia GPU driver on Klone has been updated to the latest production datacenter release, version 560.35.03.

The next maintenance will be Tuesday October 8, 2024.

AMD Math libraries#

In June we announced the addition of AMD Nodes and Slices to klone which make up our generation 2 or g2 collection of resources. Click here to read more about the difference between our g1 and g2 resources. During August, we installed a new AMD compiler suite, AOCC, along with specialized math libraries like AOCL, OpenBLAS, and ScaLAPACK as modules to make the most of this upgade. The new modules are useful on all partitions. The AOCC and AOCL modules are particularly relevant for partitions cpu-g2, cpu-g2-mem2x, and ckpt-g2. These tools are designed to optimize performance on AMD processors, speeding up complex mathematical computations. Whether you're working on simulations, data analysis, or any number-crunching tasks, these libraries may help ensure you get faster, more efficient results. If you're looking to boost your workflow, it's worth exploring how these libraries can benefit your projects. Here are the names of the new modules:

aocc/4.2.0
aocl/4.2.0
openblas/0.3.28
scalapack/2.2.0

In our benchmarking tests, performance of these libraries was similar on g1 and g2 CPUs for each math library, regardless of architecture. The best library performer on AMD CPUs is AOCC+AOCL, and for Intel CPUs it’s OpenBLAS+ScaLAPACK:

Image displays graph indicating that the best library performer on AMD CPUs is AOCC plus AOCL, and for Intel CPUs it’s OpenBLAS plus ScaLAPACK

Fall Office Hours#

Hyak HPC Staff Scientist and Facilitator, Kristen Finch, will be holding office hours fall term. Zoom office hours will be held on Wednesdays at 2pm. Attendees need only register once and can attend any of the occurrences with the Zoom link that will arrive via email.

Click here to Register

In-person office hours will be held on Thursdays at 2pm at the eScience Institute (address: WRF Data Science Studio, UW Physics/Astronomy Tower, 6th Floor, 3910 15th Ave NE, Seattle, WA 98195). Click here to RSVP for in-person Office Hours.

Click here to visit the eScience Office Hours page to see additional eScience office hours including AI/ML, R, Earth Data, and Python (not available to help with Homework).

If you would like to request 1 on 1 help, please send a ticket to help@uw.edu with "Hyak Office Hour" in the subject line to coordinate a meeting with Kristen.

August 2024 Training Videos#

In case you missed it, we recorded the August 2024 Wednesday training sessions and posted them on the UW-IT YouTube channel under the playlist, "Hyak Training." Here are the links:

Keep an eye on your indox for updates about our Fall training schedule; training sessions are currently TBA. Trainings will be announced via the Hyak mailing list, click here to join the mailing list.