Indiana University

 

Indiana University Cyberinfrastructure News

  1. Congratulations to Joseph Cottam, of the Pervasive Technology Labs
    at Indiana University, on receiving the first ever Microsoft Award,
    from the International Network of Social Network Analysis (INSNA)
    for his paper "Extended Assortivity and the Structure in the Open
    Source Development Community." The award, given to authors of
    outstanding papers that address social relations aspects of software
    development, includes a $1,000 cash prize.

    Cottam wrote the winning paper with Professor Andrew Lumsdaine,
    Director of the Open Systems Lab where Cottam works as a Graduate
    Research Assistant. The Cottam and Lumsdaine paper introduces a set
    of tools they call "Developmetrics" to investigate community
    formation and product development in the open source software
    community. Read the paper at

    http://cs.indiana.edu/~jcottam/pubs/sunbelt2008.pdf

  2. If you run a large number of jobs through Big Red (or any other
    supercomputer), you should include the line

    # @notification = never

    in your job scripts, unless you're absolutely positive your email
    server will accept a large number of emails. Read on to learn why.

    Recently, a prominent research group stepped up testing of their
    system, running close to 9,000 jobs on Big Red each day. Each job
    sent a notification of the result to the group's Gmail account.
    Thousands of emails in a short time, forwarded to an external mail
    server, led to Big Red being classified as a spammer by SpamHaus.
    This meant that anyone at any organization using SpamHaus to create
    its blacklists couldn't receive email from Big Red - including Big
    Red users at IU!

    IU sysadmins can't make sure every server out there will accept
    large numbers of emails. And since "Big Red" is not a real email
    server - it's an alias that aggregates the notification email from
    1024 nodes - we cannot use a standard bulk emailer setup to become
    a "legitimate" bulk emailer. If you run a lot of jobs, please help
    us to help you - turn off job notifications so you can still get the
    mail that you need.

  3. Big Red has a new SERIAL queue that includes all the nodes from the
    NORMAL and LONG queues. This will allow users to submit to the
    SERIAL queue single node jobs that are ideal for backfilling without
    having to choose which queue will start a batch job sooner. An IEDC
    queue has also been added that will allow access to Big Red through
    the Indiana Economic Development Corporation in partnership with
    Purdue University.

    Quarry also has a serial queue to serve the same purpose that
    includes all the nodes from the normal and long queues in addition
    to 5 dedicated nodes. A normal queue has also been added for jobs
    less than 7 days and includes 33 dedicated nodes in addition to the
    nodes from the long queue. In order to make these changes possible
    the long queue has been reduced to 42 nodes.

    Please see the following Knowledge Base documents for more details:

    Big Red Usage Policies: http://www.kb.iu.edu/data/avgm.html
    Quarry Usage Policies: http://www.kb.iu.edu/data/avpl.html

  4. The general introduction to Indiana University's Advanced
    Cyberinfrastructure is frequently updated, and has been recast in
    audio and audio/video format, for those who want to learn about
    computing, data storage, visualization and consulting while working
    on their aerobics (or who prefer a non-visual modality, for whatever
    reason).

    These items are available from

    http://rtinfo.uits.indiana.edu/documentation/

  5. Wednesday, April 2, 12:00-1:00pm - Wells Library E174
    Digital Libraries Brown Bag

    The Digital Library Program's Project Proposal Process
    Stacy Kowalczyk and Michelle Dalmau

    --------

    Thursday, April 10, 11:00am-1:00pm - Jordan Hall atrium, IUB
    Learn about IU's supercomputers from the experts!

    You're invited to stop by and visit with the system administrators
    who run IU's supercomputers, Big Red and Quarry -- two of the
    most powerful supercomputers in the world.

    You're welcome to ask questions, share ideas, or just chat in an
    informal setting. This is an opportunity for you to learn how these
    centralized research computing resources can help support your work.

    --------

    Wednesday, April 16, 12:00-1:00pm - Wells Library E174
    Digital Libraries Brown Bag

    Sakaibrary Update: Integrating Library Resources with Sakai
    Jon Dunn

    --------

    Thursday, April 24, 12:30-1:30pm -
    RT Round Table

    John Samuel, Director of the Center for Statistical and
    Mathematical Computing, will discuss Star-P, a software package
    designed to extend and parallelize high-level languages, including

    * a discussion of Star-P and how it extends Matlab,
    * optimizing Matlab code by incorporating Star-P data types, and
    * a review of Star-P availability on the IU campuses.

  6. The maintenance window for all systems is the first Tuesday of each
    month, 7am - 7pm EDT.

    Outage reports are available online at:

    http://racinfo.indiana.edu/hps/research/bigred/outages.shtml
    http://racinfo.indiana.edu/hps/research/libra/outages.shtml
    http://racinfo.indiana.edu/hps/research/quarry/outages.shtml

  7. If you have questions pertaining to IU's cyberinfrastructure, or you
    are encountering some difficulty, there are several ways to obtain
    help.

    The IU Knowledge Base (http://kb.iu.edu) is an excellent source of
    help on how to do things.

    An introduction and overview titled "Indiana University's
    CyberInfrastructure: The least you need to know" is available at

    http://rtinfo.uits.indiana.edu/documentation/

    For more information, go to:

    http://rtinfo.uits.indiana.edu/
    http://racinfo.indiana.edu/hps/


    If you have problems which the KB does not enable you to solve,
    questions about system outages, or if you just have a problem and
    you don't know who to contact, send email to
    researchtechnologies@iu.edu.