There’s always things going on at SciNet! Watch here (or follow our RSS feed, below) to hear about what’s new at our centre.
SciNet Blogs
10,000,000 Computations Served… and counting!
In the early hours of Sunday, Feb 5th, SciNet’s GPC supercomputer quietly performed its ten-millionth set of calculations for Canadian researchers, crossing the milestone by performing a simulation for an international particle physics experiment. Like a virtual factory, the SciNet computing systems run twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week; each second it is [...]
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Stopping your program at the first floating point error
If you know that somewhere in your program, there lurks a catastrophic numerical bug that puts NaNs or Infs into your results and you want to know where it first happens, the search can be a little frustrating. However, as before, the IEEE standard can help you; these illegal events (divide by zero, underflow or [...]
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The Daily Beast: Supercomputer Programmers Wanted
Scientists refer to the talent shortage as the “missing middle,” meaning there are enough specialists to run the handful of world-beating supercomputers that cost a few hundred million dollars, and plenty of people who can manage ordinary personal computers and server computer—but there are not nearly enough people who know how to use the small [...]
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New Free “Intro to HPC” eBook from TACC
To start off the new year, Victor Eijkhout from the Texas Advanced Computing Centre has released a free ebook (you can also buy a printed copy from Lulu) covering the basics of computer architecture for those scientists who want to better understand how to make their code perform well on modern machines; the basic ideas [...]
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SciNet Helps Power Search for Higgs
The group of 30 U of T researchers, including 16 graduate students, has used the SciNet super-computing resources at U of T to sift through the ATLAS data to identify collisions containing Higgs boson candidates. Find out more about how SciNet helped power Atlases search for the Higgs boson!
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Data Centre Tour, Jamaican Canadian Association
We had a great data centre tour with kids from the Jamaican Canadian Association of Ontario this weekend; the association has a fantastic Saturday Morning Tutorial program where they take their students on a variety of field trips and educational activities. The students had a million questions, and we — including CTOs Chris Loken and [...]
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Testing Roundoff
A talk has been circulating (HT: Hacker News) from a conference celebrating 50 years of scientific computing at Stanford where the author, William Kahan, discusses an old and sadly disused trick for testing the numerical stability of the implementation of an algorithm that should work with any C99 or Fortran2003 compiler without changing the underlying [...]
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