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DeiC HPC Interactive HPC Supercomputing UCloud UCloud status

New milestone as DeiC Interactive HPC reaches 6,000 users

Recently, the DeiC Interactive HPC consortium (which consists of Aarhus University, Aalborg University and the University of Southern Denmark) posted a news story about the user overload on the service. This is an issue arising from the very positive fact that the popularity of the DeiC Interactive HPC service is increasing, but it also has the unfortunate effect that some users are now experiencing longer waiting time on the machines than usual.

Needless to say, however, the DeiC Interactive HPC consortium is immensely proud of the success of the service – and now it can also announce that the UCloud platform, which is used to provide the DeiC Interactive HPC service, has passed 6,000 users. So many users on a service which has only been operational for 2,5 years is a great achievement.

“Overall, we’re seeing an increase in the number of new users at nearly all the 8 universities in Denmark. One significant factor for the past few months is that the number of users from Copenhagen University, which has not been using the facility extensively so far, is now increasing at a steady pace. This is both great news, but also a warning sign for us, as KU is a big university and we will need to be prepared to accommodate even more users in the future.”

Prof. Claudio Pica, director of the SDU eScience Center and DeiC Interactive HPC Consortium representative

Another factor, which causes significant spikes in the number of new users at the start of every semester, is the number of students who log on the service because the UCloud software is used as part of their courses.

The consortium is working hard to add more hardware to the DeiC Interactive HPC service to alleviate the current periods of overload. In the meantime, you can find a number of tips for how to avoid overload issues here.

This update was originally posted by the SDU eScience Center.

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DeiC Interactive HPC UCloud UCloud status

The cost of success – user overload on DeiC Interactive HPC

 

While there was never any doubt that DeiC Interactive HPC would be a success, the popularity of the HPC facility has taken the Interactive HPC consortium a little by surprise. The two-year old system reached no less than 5000 users back in December, and while every milestone is celebrated the rapid success also comes with a price. 

We’re seeing an average rise in users of 1000 each quarter and we’re very proud of the success. However, with an average utilisation of 135% of resources for containerised applications, we’re also experiencing issues with user overload recurring more and more frequently as more users join.

DeiC Interactive HPC Consortium representative, Professor Kristoffer Nielbo, Center for Humanities Computing, Aarhus University

Additional hardware would solve most of the issues but adding more hardware is a time-consuming process, and in the meantime the consortium behind Interactive HPC is working on other solutions to ensure the best user experience. 

We are currently working on making operational status available to users to allow them to see when user overload is causing issues and plan their work differently accordingly. The part of Interactive HPC running on SDU already has a solution underway, and the part of the system located at AAU will follow as soon as possible.

Professor Kristoffer Nielbo

However, users can also actively do things to avoid the user overload issues. The DeiC Interactive HPC consortium recommends that; Small users should make sure they only use the resources they need; medium users are asked to consider whether their work could be done on other HPC systems; and large users should apply for resources via the national calls.  

Applying for national resources may not fix the problem right now but by doing so researchers indicate that there is a need for additional hardware for Interactive HPC, and this can help speed up the expansion process.

Professor Kristoffer Nielbo

The consortium also recommends using the new DeiC Integration portal when it makes sense. The portal integrates multiple national HPC systems and allows for users to seamlessly shift to other facilities clearing up space for users whose only option is Interactive HPC.  

The consortium will continue work on solving any issues and ensure that necessary resources are available because there’s no doubt that interactive HPC is here to stay as a favourite HPC resource for researchers.

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Interactive HPC Research UCloud

National Health Data Science Sandbox for Training and Research

UCloud is not just an ideal platform for the individual researcher who wants interactive access to HPC resources or an easy way to collaborate with national or international partners. It is also highly suitable for teaching. Jennifer Bartell and Samuele Soraggi, who are both working on the project National Health Data Science Sandbox for Training and Research, share their experiences with using UCloud.

National “sandbox” platform

The growing amounts of data in all research fields offer researchers new opportunities and possibilities for scientific breakthrough. In the case of health science, the use of large amounts of data has great potential to improve our health care – it can e.g. expand our ability to understand and diagnose diseases. One of the constraints of using health data is that many datasets (e.g. person-specific health records or genomics data) are sensitive from a patient privacy perspective and governed by strict access and usage guidelines. This can be a major challenge in particular for students or researchers who are just learning best practices in handling health data while also developing data science skills.

Go to SDU eScience for full story

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DeiC HPC Interactive HPC Supercomputing UCloud UCloud status Uncategorized

DeiC Interactive HPC reaches 4.000 users on UCloud

We’re approaching the end of the second year with DeiC Interactive HPC – and there are now 4000 users on UCloud!

During the first year with DeiC Interactive HPC, UCloud reached more than 2000 users. We’re glad that the interest in the platform has continued to grow throughout the second year.

Go to SDU eScience for full story

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HPC Interactive HPC Teaching UCloud

Teaching Humanities in UCloud

UCloud has been a game changer for Assistant Professor of Cognitive Science and Humanities Computing (Aarhus University), Ross Deans Kristensen-McLachlan, teaching within the crossroads of cultural studies and data science.

In short, the benefits of UCloud within teaching narrows down to a much more trouble-free teaching process free of unnecessary technical issues, allowing teachers as well as students to focus on the substance of their work.

Benefits when teaching in UCloud

One of the major benefits is the computational resources available in terms of having more computing power, allowing students to focus on state-of-the-art work.

Assistant Professor Ross Deans Kristensen-McLachlan

Ross has been teaching two elective Cultural Data Science bachelor courses as well as a master’s level course on Natural Language Processing (NLP) for students of Cognitive Science. A clear before and after characterises the two elective courses, formerly run on a local server: as more than 25 students typically had to have access to the server, it naturally required a lot of energy and time. As a result, actual time to do state-of-the-art work was typically limited but with UCloud this kind of downtime has been reduced significantly. Barriers that could potentially make students new to computational methods loose interest in the field have therefore also been reduced.

Another major benefit, according to Ross, is that UCloud allows all students to work from the same starting point and reduces possible imbalances between students with brand new computers and students with older computer models:

One thing about UCloud, that I actually think is quite important, is that it kind of democratises access to resources.

Assistant Professor Ross Deans Kristensen-McLachlan

In terms of teaching, several palpable benefits allow teachers and students alike to concentrate on the substantial content of the respective courses. Some challenges do, however, arise in class, though these are typically rather insignificant such as some minor issues when integrating with GitHub.

UCloud and the humanities

When teaching the elective courses on Cultural Data Science, Ross has encountered humanities students with no background within computational methods whatsoever. This, however, turned out to be an advantage as the students were typically open and able to adapt quickly:

Because UCloud has eliminated a lot of former technical obstacles and barriers, students can focus on learning good programming practices and the results of their research. It allows us to focus on the task at hand. The students don’t have to know how the backend works; they don’t have to be computer scientists – they are humanities students and should be able to think about humanities objects (texts, visuals etc.) using computational methods.

Assistant Professor Ross Deans Kristensen-McLachlan

As such, UCloud is “a means to an end”, Ross emphasises. Though computational background knowledge is of course far from irrelevant, the objective for the Cultural Data Science courses has been to educate the students to think critically when working with computational methods:

We are not just looking at data science methods and applying them uncritically. We try to use the students’ main expertise and encourage them to apply their subject knowledge to think critically about their results when working with computational methods. Determining the notion ‘genre’ from a classification model eg. urges the students to think critically about the notion itself – is it even something we can determine from text alone?

Assistant Professor Ross Deans Kristensen-McLachlan

Overall, the students following Ross’ courses have been extremely positive about UCloud, even though some were sceptics to begin with. Two kinds of feedback characterised the reception of UCloud from the students in general: one group fully integrated with UCloud from the start, others came to accept it as a necessary (useful) tool.

Collaborate teaching resources

Among teachers from the department of Linguistics, Cognitive Science, and Semiotics at Aarhus University, UCloud has furthermore improved the internal coherence across the department for the benefit of both students and teachers. As most teachers have moved all their material on to UCloud, students now avoid using one set of tools for one course and one set of tools for another course.

Besides the many teaching-related benefits to be gained from UCloud, Ross further emphasises the ongoing dialogue between users of UCloud and the team who maintain it:

They are very responsive to suggestions. Over the past year it’s (UCloud) become even more fully featured in terms of what you can do with it, and I don’t see that stopping any time soon.

Assistant Professor Ross Deans Kristensen-McLachlan

One potential improvement of UCloud, Ross suggests, could be the implementation of some sort of outreach program in order to get even more people to gain from the benefits:

UCloud gets rid of all the annoying things. As far as I can see there are only benefits – the minor issues are vastly outnumbered by the benefits.

Assistant Professor Ross Deans Kristensen-McLachlan
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HPC Interactive HPC Supercomputing UCloud

New UCloud release

Since we discontinued our support for mounting your local folders onto UCloud using WebDAV, have we been in search of a way to allow the users of UCloud to work with their files locally without having to re-upload them to UCloud after every change. We are happy to announce that we now have a new solution that gives the possibility to synchronize your local files with your UCloud file storage.

Go to SDU eScience for more information on the release

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DeiC HPC Supercomputing UCloud

Call for applications for National HPC resources

As a researcher or Ph.d. Student at a Danish university you can now apply for resources on the national HPC centers, including the Danish part of EuroHPC LUMI.

The second call for applications for regular access to resources on the national HPC centers is now open. This includes applications for the Danish part of EuroHPC LUMI. The call is open for applications from all research areas.

As part of the use of the national e-infrastructures DeiC issues calls for applications on the use of the national resources. The projects are granted resources after application and on basis of assessment of research quality and technical feasibility.

The applications are evaluated by the appointed e-ressource committe and the grants are approved by the DeiC board.

Deadline for applications are 4th of October 2022 midnight, and the resources will be available for use from 1. January 2023.

For more information visit DeiC

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DeiC Event Supercomputing UCloud Workshop

DeiC Interactive HPC Back Office workshop

On May 10th, the SDU eScience Center was visited by colleagues from Aarhus University and Aalborg University for a Back Office workshop in the DeiC Interactive HPC consortium. The DeiC Interactive HPC Back Office collaborates on the development and operation of the facility. 

The overall topic of the workshop was “Developing UCloud apps” and discussion points included development tools, development workflow, deployment of apps on UCloud, to name a few. 

“The main focus of the workshop was to share our knowledge and experience in developing applications for UCloud with other members of the consortium. During the lessons we took a specific use case to demonstrate all the steps of the app development workflow, doing a live coding session with all the participants

Emiliano Molinaro, team leader for the user support team at the SDU eScience Center.

This is an excerpt. Click here for the full story.