This is the October, 2000 newsletter of the ITC Research Computing Support Group. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the information presented here please contact the ITC Research Computing Support Group via email to res-consult@virginia.edu, or at the Research Computing Support Center, 244 Wilson Hall, 243-8800. The Research Computing Support Center is open 9AM-5PM, Monday through Friday.
Join the members of the ITC Research Computing Support Group for our Fall 2000 Brownbag Series. Each brownbag will be held at 12 noon at the Research Computing Support Center (244 Wilson Hall). Bring your lunch, we'll supply the drinks and cookies.
18 October: Automatic Parallelization and OpenMP
This talk is the second of a three part series of brownbag talks
on getting high performance from compute intensive programs. This
second talk will focus on easily accessible techniques to parallelize
code where parallelization is appropriate, including automatic
parallelizing compilers, IMSL F90 MP library calls, and OpenMP.
15 November: Parallel Processing Using MPI
This talk is the third of a three part series of brownbag talks on
getting high performance from compute intensive programs. This third
talk will focus on using MPI (Message Passing Interface) to efficiently
parallelize code where parallelization is appropriate, including naturally
parallel programs such as Monte Carlo simulations.
If you need additional information, contact the Research Computing Support Group at res-consult@virginia.edu or call the Research Computing Support Center at 243-8800.
This summer SUN MicroSystems, Inc. contacted over 300 colleges and universities to solicit equipment proposals for a competitive grant program called Sun MindPrint. This program would award schools SUN equipment for use in the areas engineering, computer science, and e-commerce instruction. The UVa School of Engineering and Applied Science submitted a 40 page composite proposal describing 16 individual projects to Sun Microsystems. UVa received the largest single award from this program to a University in the country. The recipients include: Systems Engineering, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Biomedical Engineering / Radiology, the SEAS Dean's Office, and Information Technology and Communication (ITC).
ITC has received and installed the 15 new Ultra 60 Sun Workstations
from their piece of the SUN MicroSystems MindPrint grant award. Hamp
Carruth and his staff worked hard to install 5 new Sun Ultra 60s in the
E225 Thornton Hall facility as well as 10 Ultra 60s in the 102 Small
Hall computer lab. These 15 machines replaced 13 older Sun Sparc20 and
Sparc1 workstations. They are in place and operational. They are
available for console or remote login under the hostnames of
"sun-19.unixlab" through "sun-33.unixlab".
In the 102 Small Hall Unix Lab, additional improvements and renovations
are underway. The Tektronics color and HP LaserJet B/W printers
were moved from the back of the room to the front to make them more
accessible. Additional improvements are planned this fall including
continuing to replace the older model Sun and SGI workstations.
ITC has installed the IMSL Fortran 90 MP Numerical Library (F90 MP) Version 4.0 on the following Unix platforms: RS/6000, SGI, and Sun. The IMSL numerical libraries are a collection of over 1000 Fortran routines that implement algorithms useful in mathematical and statistical analysis. Our site license is for 25 runtime floating network licenses.
The numerical algorithms of the F90 MP Library can be accessed using Fortran 77 or using Fortran 90 language constructs. The same functionality of the IMSL Fortran 77 Numerical Libraries (FNL) is available in the IMSL F90 MP Library and calls to IMSL FNL routines will continue to function like the earlier Fortran 77 compilers. In addition, the IMSL F90 MP Library allows users to easily take advantage of parallel computing through the library's underlying use of the Message Passing Interface (MPI) libraries if their environment supports it (e.g. the IBM SP).
ITC is no longer licensing upgrades for the IMSL Fortran 77 Numerical Libraries (FNL 3.0) and C Numerical Libraries (CNL 2.5) on its Unix platforms but will continue to maintain them as long as the respective operating systems remain compatible. The reasons for this change are that the FNL Libraries are subset of the F90 MP Library and the CNL Libraries received insufficient use to justify their cost. We encourage users of these older libraries to begin compiling their code with the F90 MP Library and the ITC Research Computing Group will provide assistance with this transition if its needed. A detailed description of the IMSL F90 MP Library can be found at the URL,
http://www.vni.com/products/imsl/imslf90.html
Further information about using the new IMSL F90 MP Library as well as the older FNL and CNL Libraries can be found on the Research Computing Services Web page at,
http://www.itc.virginia.edu/research/imsl.html
Specific questions about this upgrade as well general questions
concerning as the use of the IMSL Libraries should be directed to
res-consult@virginia.edu.
The following changes to the research computing software will be made in all ITC Labs and Classrooms as of this coming January:
S-Plus 2000 for Windows, Release 2 will be upgraded to Release 3 SAS 8.0 will be upgraded to 8.1 Minitab 13.1 will be upgraded to 13.2
Please contact the Research Computing Support Group (res-consult@virginia.edu) if you have any questions, comments or suggestions for other upgrades.
ITC has now concluded its annual site license agreement with SPSS, Inc. Under the new agreement, ITC now has a perpetual license for SPSS on all platforms. For SPSS users, a perpetual license will mean that users will no longer have to update their licenses annually. The new perpetual SPSS code will be available to the UVa community within the coming weeks (and will be announced via this newsletter and a specific mailing to all licensed SPSS users). Once applying the perpetual code, a user's SPSS license will not have to be updated ever again. Of course, the usual stipulations of the UVa-SPSS site license remain in effect; specifically, users are not permitted to use the software once they leave UVa.
As discussed in the last Research Computing newsletter (September 2000), under the new site license agreement, some SPSS modules were dropped because of lack of use and others were added to the license. For a complete list of SPSS modules licensed under the new agreement, please refer to the September 2000 Research Computing newsletter:
http://www.itc.virginia.edu/research/news/news.letter.0900.html#spsslic
The site-licensed version of SPSS is available for home and office use by all UVa faculty and staff. It can also be installed by UVa students on a UVa-owned computer. The site-licensed version of SPSS can be obtained from the Research Computing Support Center. For home use, UVa students must purchase the Graduate Pack version of SPSS from Cavalier Computers.
Over the next several months, the Research Computing Support Group is
undertaking a review of the web resources available to research users
through the new ITCWeb Research Portal located at the URL:
http://www.itc.virginia.edu/researchers
The goals of this review are to examine ways to better organize the information and to develop new information, links, and resources of help to users. We would very much like to hear from the user community about your suggestions for improving our web resources. In particular, your input on what you currently find useful about our pages and what you would like to see on the pages in the future. All suggestions and comments can be forwarded to the Research Computing Support Group by e-mailing Res-Consult@Virginia.EDU