Bulletin 163 - 2006 October 18

1. New Userguide Sections: Known Problems
2. NEC ASL/SX Math Library, FSA, and PSUITE IDE Packages
3. NQSII qsub wrapper to be updated: Wednesday 25th October
4. SX-6 Performance Tuning Seminar: 15th November
5. TX-7 interactive performance: unfixable
6. Cherax - tcl-nap v6.2.3
7. CSIRO: HPSC now on AARNet3
8. OzViz2006: October 30-31 at UWA
9. General Linux/Unix queries: ls time format, gvimdiff

Note: "CSIRO" items can apply to BoM users of cherax and burnet

Over the next weeks the System UserGuides on the HPCCC web site are being enhanced with a "Known Problems" sections for each system. It will include potentially significant or problematic issues that have been identified, with information on workarounds. Please be patient as these sections are filled in.

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As we work on future supercomputer requirements we want to drop software that is not necessary. Reports suggest there is very little use of NEC's ASL/SX math library, PSUITE, and FSA.

Would all SX-6 users who are using or considering using these packages please contact Phil Tannenbaum ( ) with details of what is or will be used, how important that is, and if there are attractive alternatives you can suggest.

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The qsubnew version of the qsub wrapper has been updated to accept jobs to specify the -S parameter, as announced in HPCbull 162.1.

This version will replace the current qsub default wrapper on Wednesday 25th October at 09:30.

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On Wednesday 15 November Joerg Henrichs will present a seminar on Performance tuning on SX-6.

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Increased interactive use of the TX-7 has run up against known performance issues in Linux 2.4. These problems were also experienced on cherax before its recent upgrade to a 2.6 kernel. It is not possible to upgrade the TX-7s because the NEC GFS file system is supported only on linux 2.4.

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tcl-nap v6.2.3 (http://tcl-nap.sourceforge.net/) has been released by Harvey Davies (CMAR) and is now available on cherax. You can access the tcl-nap software by doing the following:

% module load tcl-nap/6.2.3

Support for netCDF, HDF and PROJ4 is included. It will become the default (when you just do "module load tcl-nap") on Monday 23rd October. After that date the old version will still be available for a short time by doing "module load tcl-nap/5.0.5".

Note: Previously, Harvey has kindly provided access to his own installation of tcl-nap on cherax. We suggest that users of tcl-nap move to using the HPSC installation allowing us to better manage the software and on-going support.

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Previously we used our Grangenet fibre to reach the AARNet2 POP at a 100Mb/s bottleneck at the University of Melbourne. The demise of Grangenet forced a rapid move to AARNet3. With the removal of the 100Mb/s bottleneck some of our networking performance has got worse! We are investigating and have high hopes of future excellent performance when the teething troubles of our new networking arrangements have been sorted out.

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From the web site, http://ozviz2006.wasp.uwa.edu.au/cms/: "This workshop will be held in the spirit of previous ones: short, practical presentations by people who are active practitioners in the visualisation field."

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HPCCC staff are not necessarily the best source of general expertise in Linux/Unix, outside of the high performance computational area. However we do use it every day, and we are happy to try to help. We are also happy to install any software you want if the licensing can be arranged.

If you are interested in influencing the date format displayed by the ls command, have a look at req #7150. If you are interested in a powerful system for interactive differencing and merging of files then see req #7416.

To see a req by number, click the "Show..." link on the req page: http://intra.hpsc.csiro.au/cgi-bin/wreq/req?list. Then type the number in the box that is then displayed.

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