| The CoSeC Annual Conference 2024 will be held in conjunction with CIUK 2024 and will take place on Wednesday 4 December.
Final details are currently being confirmed and a full programm will be available soon.
Please note that all attendees for the CoSeC Conference MUST be registered via the CIUK 2024 registration page.
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| Technical/SysAdmin Meetup
Wednesday 4 December - 13:00-16:00 - Exchange Room 1
A meeting for technical staff and systems administrators to discuss the latest topics in the field and share information and ideas. This will be an unconference-style event, where the technical staff are able to steer the discussion to a variety of topics of interest. This meeting has been very popular for the last two years, and we expect a similar level of interest this year.If you have any topics of particular interest you feel strongly about, feel free to register them in advance.
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| STEP-UP - developing HPC technical professionals
Wednesday 4 December - 16:00-17:00 - Exchange Room 1
The STEP-UP project aims to change the landscape for digital Research Technical Professionals (dRTPs) within the London and South East of England region, while sharing developments, approaches and findings with the wider community, across the UK and beyond.We class dRTPs as anyone undertaking work related to software, data and computing infrastructure / High Performance Computing (HPC) within the research community. In this session we’ll focus on the HPC-related aspects of STEP-UP’s activities.How did you become an HPC technical professional? How do you progress as an HPC technical professional? What’s missing to support the next generation of HPC experts? Share your journeys and learn about the STEP-UP project and how we’re looking to support the HPC community. The session will begin with a couple of short introductory presentations to set the scene. However, this will be an interactive session where we would like to hear from you about the routes you have takenyour journeys into your roles, your learning journeys and your perspectives on career opportunities within the HPC community.The information shared in this session will help us in our identification of career and learning pathways for HPC professionals’ careers and the skills and career professional development requirements. As part of its activities over the next few years, the STEP-UP project will also be setting up a programme to support short-term secondments to help technical professionals develop their specialist expertise and share skills, and creating a mentoring programme. We want to know how you think you could benefit from such opportunities and what you’d like to see within these schemes? What can we offer you to help further develop the HPC community, address challenges around skills shortages and recruitment, and provide more opportunities for technical engagement across institutions. We’ll close with a summary, thoughts around next steps and an opportunity for participants to provide their contact details to engage further with us or receive updates on the work of STEP-UP.
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 | We are delighted to confirm the the Lustre User Group 2024 Meeting will again be co-located alongside CIUK 2024.
The meeting will be held on Wednesday 4 December - starting at 12:30 with a one hour new user training session, and the main meeting to follow between 14:00 and 17:00.
Please note that registration for this meeting is seperate to registration for CIUK 2024.
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| Portable benchmarking and profiling using ReFrame
Thursday 5 December - 09:30-13:00 - CIUK Breakout Room
Testing and benchmarking scientific applications on HPC systems still often relies on manual effort and specialist knowledge. This makes studying application performance across HPC systems time consuming and error prone. In this session we show how building, running and measuring the performance of applications can be automated to develop benchmarks across HPC systems using ReFrame.ReFrame is widely used for regression testing by HPC services from small group clusters up to the largest supercomputers in the world (including the UK national supercomputer, ARCHER2). Together with Spack and lightweight profiling tools, we have used ReFrame to build an automated benchmarking pipeline for the ExCALIBUR Hardware and Enabling Software program for cross-platform benchmarking.The workshop will introduce using ReFrame to automate benchmarking and collecting performance data. Participants will learn to write a simple ReFrame test, run it on a HPC platform, measure its performance and compare against achievable peak performance of the system. Following the session, attendees should have enough knowledge to start using ReFrame in their day-to-day activities.The workshop is aimed at attendees who have an understanding of basic HPC concepts and are interested in the performance of scientific applications. This includes both system administrators who run benchmarks to monitor the performance of a system, as well as application developers who are interested in performance benchmarks in their development workflow. Attendees will need to bring a laptop with an SSH client installed to access a remote facility to develop and run the ReFrame tests. A working knowledge of Python is required to develop tests in ReFrame. We will provide a repository with setup instructions and examples that will be communicated to attendees before the session starts and during the session.The workshop will be taught by the developers from the ExCALIBUR benchmarking project, and ARCHER2 service staff who have experience of using ReFrame in production. We will provide access to ARCHER2 and example applications to work on. The workshop is a mix of short presentations, carpentries-style live coding, and hands on sessions with helpers.
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| Cybersecurity and Federation for National DRI, AI and HPC Resources
Thursday 5 December - 14:00-16:00 - CIUK Breakout Room
The threat faced by the UK research and education community from cyberattack is persistent, with well publicised incidents against members of our community both nationally and internationally. Digital Research Infrastructures involving these organisations form a critical part of the supply chain of the UK and thus we must evolve a collective, collaborative approach to our defence in the face of this threat. Organisers of this session include representatives of the DRI Cybersecurity community including JISC and national HPC and AI Research Resource providers. With the HPC focus of CIUK, we seek to bring together a community of practice to share ongoing activities and engage with the wider CIUK participants In parallel, the research communities have ever- increasing needs for securely sharing data and accessing powerful computing resources within a federated ecosystem; the impact of the risks involved with these requirements must be carefully assessed so that we can provide secure, assured access to our national resources. A tentative outline of the session: Welcome and introductionOverview from the organisers (DRI Cybersecurity, JISC, and AIRR)Cybersecurity topicsAAI topicsOpen discussionClose and next steps/events.
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 | CIUK is thrilled to host the 3rd Annual Women in HPC Breakfast on Friday 6 December! Join us starting at 8:00 AM for breakfast, with presentations kicking off at 8:30 AM. This year's event features the exciting finale of Move the Needle - a 12-month project on equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility (EDIA). Move the Needle brought together nine participants from the UK and US to set impactful EDIA goals, with the project evolving along the way as the HPC/AI community added their own contributions. Three of those team members will take the stage and share their experiences, with an overview presented by the team project manager. Following the presentation we will host an open forum with attendees. This breakfast is included with your conference pass. To see the full agenda, click here, and to learn more about Move the Needle, click here.
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| Storage Scale (GPFS) User Group / New Users Session
Friday 6 December - 10:30-13:30 - CIUK Breakout Room
GPFS User Group CIUK 2024Planned to be 2 hours, but with a new User session extending it to three hours.Continuing on from user groups at CIUK from a number of years, we want to run another Storage Scale User group at CIUK 2024. The user group will combine user talks, Vendor presentations and IBM engineer Talks around the user of and future directions of Storage Scale. The user group beings together representation from media, academia, finance, research, automotive, defence and pharmaceutical industries. We would also like to continue with the new user sessions that have been successfully run at previous user group meetings including at the event hosted at IBM in June 2024. These sessions have been well received and are helping to build expertise for the future to fill the admin roles required to run these systems.The User group continues to be run by users for users, and is not run by IBM, but we work closely with IBM. The Spectrum Scale User Group aims to:
•Bring together users of Spectrum Scale and Spectrum Scale with Spectrum Protect ILM (TSM HSM) into a collective environment•Represent the needs of the Spectrum Scale User Group members
•Liaise with IBM and our User Group members to improve Spectrum Scale and Spectrum Scale with Spectrum Protect ILM
•Provide a “localised” community for support and knowledge sharing•Raise awareness of Spectrum Scale as a capable data management platformI can provide a more detailed description if needed.
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| ExCALIBUR Hardware and enabling software: Exploring next generation technologies for HPC
Friday 6 December - 11:00-13:00 - Exchange Room 1
There are a wealth of new hardware technologies being made available for HPC. Driven by the boom in AI, vendors promise that these can deliver improved performance and significant energy savings, but a key question is how closely this matches reality and how realistic these are for HPC workloads. This is the challenge that the ExCALIBUR H&ES programme has been looking to explore since 2019 by setting up a range of novel hardware testbeds across the UK.H&ES has provided not just the hardware itself, but also addressed the observation that a key challenge in leveraging such technologies is in the software ecosystem. In this session we will reflect on the successes of the H&ES programme, describe some of the key testbeds that audience members can gain access to, and explore future opportunities to build upon the outcomes of H&ES with the CIUK community.
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| UKRI National Federated Compute Services NetworkPlus
Friday 6 December - 14:00-16:00 - CIUK Breakout Room
Introduction to the community of the recently DRI funded National Federated Compute Services NetworkPlus. The project team is led by Jon Hays (QMUL) with co-leads Sadaf Alam (University of Bristol), Adrian Hines (JASMIN, STFC), Josephine Beech-Brandt (EPCC, University of Edinburgh) and Vasil Alexandrov(Hartree, STFC)). We would like an opportunity to engage with the community and present the timeline for the workshops and calls which are being planned and discuss flexible funding for projects. We can provide more details if required.
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