Press Releases

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama’s State of the Union Speech was so technology-focused that it buoyed expectations that U.S. investment in IT, particularly supercomputing, will survive his other plan to freeze domestic spending for five years.

In his recent speech, Obama made clear that the government’s role is to provide “cutting-edge scientists and inventors with the support they need.” He cited a string of U.S. advances developed with government support, including the Internet and GPS, as well as some current research projects, particularly in alternative energy, to make his case for federal investment.

Early Saturday morning, January 15th, the SHARCNET border router suffered a software crash of its primary cpu. The crash caused a soft reset but left the router in a semi-functional state. Some services appeared available to a subset of external users depending on where they were connecting from. Others had little, to no connectivity, including DNS timeouts and name lookup failures. A cold restart of the router was needed to restore it to proper operation. This was done at approximately 7am, Monday morning.

The side effect of this odd routing state was that it left several systems and networking infrastructure unstable, causing further outages to specific clusters and services at Western (ie. mail, web, global work, goblin). By 11am, most services were fully restored and the goblin cluster was restored shortly after.

Some running jobs may have failed due to IO errors, but most will have waited until the filesystems were restored. Due to the restart, all running jobs on goblin were terminated. If you have concerns over a failed job, please send an email to help@sharcnet.ca. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

CANARIE and Compute Canada have initiated discussions aimed at building a stronger partnership designed to ensure that High Performance Computing and High Performance Networking are recognized and supported as infrastructure fundamental to research and innovation.

Both organizations serve Canada’s research and education communities, support research excellence, and contribute to the ability of researchers to do world-leading research. As such, we are working together to explore a joint infrastructure vision.

CANARIE and Compute Canada will be looking at how we might work better together to create efficiencies, improve service to the communities we serve and facilitate access to and use of the infrastructures we design, implement and operate.

Meetings to date have demonstrated that we can and should be working more closely together. As we look at options there may be organizational changes required to optimize our relationship. However, those will only take place if there is a demonstrable benefit to the research community and the citizens of Canada.

We will provide regular updates on the status of our discussions and will be consulting with you and our communities as well as with other stakeholders such as the federal and provincial governments, the funding agencies and others for whom an integrated digital infrastructure will enable and support their initiatives. See PDF version.

Thanks to generous support from SciNet, SHARCNET, and others, Software Carpentry will be offered online this fall to 40 students at Ontario universities. The course will be taught online: each week, students will view a series of video lectures and work through exercises with support from the instructor and TAs through Skype, desktop sharing, web forums, and other channels.

If you, your colleagues, or your students are interested, please visit http://software-carpentry.org/blog/fall-2010/ for details, or contact the course administrator at info@software-carpentry.org. The course is non-credit, but there is no charge for enrollment. While capacity is limited, the course will be offered periodically.

A printable poster is also available for distribution.

Planning is underway for the Compute Canada booth at SC’10.

SuperComputing 2010
The Future of Discovery
New Orleans, LA, November 13 – 19, 2010.

Researchers using HPC in Canada are invited to submit proposals for demo presentations at the event. Compute Canada is requesting demos that are visually captivating and fall into one of the following conference areas: climate simulation, heterogeneous computing and data intensive computing. Demonstrations may be presented onsite or, if there is significant interest, Compute Canada will provide a high speed connection to enable remote presentations. Please identify any preferred times and if there are any complementary posters or handouts.

Researchers may submit their demo proposal to Susan Baldwin, susan.baldwin@computecanada.org, with a brief statement explaining the importance of HPC to their work and describing their demonstration’s technical requirements.