Tag: computers

Jan 05 2019

New year’s resolution

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  • January 5, 2019

A new year, a new beginning.

For most people this is a time of making promises, starting new habits or stopping old ones. In general, I forgo making such promises, as I know they turn out idle in a mere few weeks without external stimulus or any real driving force.

In spite of this, I do have a new years resolution for this year: I am going to study machine learning and use it for any suitable application I can get my hands on (which will mainly be materials science, but one never knows).  I already have a few projects in mind, which should help me stay focused and on track. With some luck, you will be reading about them here on this blog. With some more luck, they may even end up being part of an actual scientific publication.

But first things first, learn the basics (beyond hear-say messages of how excellent and world improving AI is/will be). What are the different types of machine learning available, is it all black box or do you actually have some control over things. Is it a kind of magic? What’s up with all these frameworks (isn’t there anyone left who can program?), and why the devil seem they all to be written in a script langue (python) instead of a proper programming language? A lot of questions I hope to see answered. A lot of things to learn. Lets start by building some foundations…the old fashioned way: By studying using a book, with real paper pages!

Happy New Year, and best wishes to you all!

Permanent link to this article: https://dannyvanpoucke.be/new-years-resolution-en/

Dec 26 2018

Defensive Programming and Debugging

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  • December 26, 2018

Last few months, I finally was able to remove something which had been lingering on my to-do list for a very long time: studying debugging in Fortran. Although I have been programming in Fortran for over a decade, and getting quite good at it, especially in the more exotic aspects such as OO-programming, I never got around to learning how to use decent debugging tools. The fact that I am using Fortran was the main contributing factor. Unlike other languages, everything you want to do in Fortran beyond number-crunching in procedural code has very little documentation (e.g., easy dll’s for objects), is not natively supported (e.g., find a good IDE for fortran, which also supports modern aspects like OO, there are only very few who attempt), or you are just the first to try it (e.g., fortran programs for android :o, definitely on my to-do list). In a long bygone past I did some debugging in Delphi (for my STM program) as the debugger was nicely integrated in the IDE. However, for Fortran I started programming without an IDE and as such did my initial debugging with well placed write statements. And I am a bit ashamed to say, I’m still doing it this way, because it can be rather efficient for a large code spread over dozens of files with hundreds of procedures.

However, I am trying to repent for my sins. A central point in this penance was enlisting for the online MOOC  “Defensive Programming and Debugging“. Five weeks of intense study followed, in which I was forced to use command line gdb and valgrind. During these five weeks I also sharpened my skills at identifying possible sources of bugs (and found some unintentional bugs in the course…but that is just me). Five weeks of hard study, and taking tests, I successfully finished the course, earning my certificate as defensive programmer and debugger. (In contrast to my sometimes offensive programming and debugging skills before 😉 .)

Permanent link to this article: https://dannyvanpoucke.be/defensive-programming-en/

Aug 29 2017

Exa-scale computing future in Europe?

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  • August 29, 2017

As a computational materials scientist with a main research interest in the ab initio simulation of materials, computational resources are the life-blood of my research. Over the last decade, I have seen my resource usage grow from less than 100.000 CPU hours per year to several million CPU-hours per year. To satisfy this need for computational resources I have to make use of HPC facilities, like the TIER-2 machines available at the Flemish universities and the Flemish TIER-1 supercomputer, currently hosted at KU Leuven. At the international level, computational scientists have access to so called TIER-0 machines, something I no doubt will make use of in the future. Before I continue, let me first explain a little what this TIER-X business actually means.

The TIER-X notation is used to give an indication of the size of the computer/supercomputer indicated. There are 4 sizes:

  •  TIER-3: This is your personal computer(laptop/desktop) or even a small local cluster of a research group. It can contain from one (desktop) up to a few hundred CPU’s (local cluster). Within materials research, this is sufficient for quite a few tasks: post-processing of data, simple force-field based calculations, or even small quantum chemical or solid state calculations. A large fraction of the work during my first Ph.D. was performed on the local cluster of the CMS.
  • TIER-2: This is a supercomputer hosted by an institute or university. It generally contains over 1000 CPUs and has a peak performance of >10 TFLOPS (1012 Floating Point Operations Per Second, compare this to 1-50×109 FLOPS or 1-25 GFLOPS of an average personal computer). The TIER-2 facilities of the VUB and UAntwerp both have a peak performance of about 75TFLOPS , while the machines at Ghent University and the KU Leuven/Uhasselt facilities both have a peak performance of about 230 TFLOPS. Using these machines I was able to perform the calculations necessary for my study of dopant elements in cerates (and obtain my second Ph.D.).
  • TIER-1: Moving up one more step, there are the national/regional supercomputers. These generally contain over 10.000 CPUs and have a peak performance of over 100 TFLOPS. In Flanders the Flemish Supercomputer Center (VSC) manages the TIER-1 machine (which is being funded by the 5 Flemish universities). The first TIER-1 machine was hosted at Ghent University, while the second and current one is hosted at KU Leuven, an has a peak performance of 623 TFLOPS (more than all TIER-2 machines combined), and cost about 5.5 Million € (one of the reasons it is a regional machine). Over the last 5 years, I was granted over 10 Million hours of CPU time, sufficient for my study of Metal-Organic Frameworks and defects in diamond.
  • TIER-0: This are international level supercomputers. These machines contain over 100.000 CPUs, and have a peak performance in excess of 1 PFLOP (1 PetaFLOP = 1000 TFLOPS). In Europe the TIER-0 facilities are available to researchers via the PRACE network (access to 7 TIER-0 machines, accumulated 43.49 PFLOPS).

This is roughly the status of what is available today for Flemish scientists at various levels. With the constantly growing demand for more processing power, the European union, in name of EuroHPC, has decided in march of this year, that Europe will host two Exa-scale computers. These machines will have a peak performance of at least 1 EFLOPS, or 1000 PFLOPS. These machines are expected to be build by 2024-2025. In June, Belgium signed up to EuroHPC as the eighth country participating, in addition, to the initial 7 countries (Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Luxemburg and The Netherlands).

This is very good news for all involved in computational research in Flanders. There is the plan to build these machines, there is a deadline, …there just isn’t an idea of what these machines should look like (except: they will be big, massively power consuming and have a target peak performance). To get an idea what users expect of such a machine, Tier-1 and HPC users have been asked to put forward requests/suggestions of what they want.

From my user personal experience, and extrapolating from my own usage I see myself easily using 20 million hours of CPU time each year by the time these Exa-scale machines are build. Leading a computational group would multiply this value. And then we are talking about simple production purpose calculations for “standard” problems.

The claim that an Exa-scale scale machine runs 1000x faster than a peta-scale machine, is not entirely justified, at least not for the software I am generally encountering. As software seldom scales linearly, the speed-gain from Exa-scale machinery mainly comes from the ability to perform many more calculations in parallel. (There are some exceptions which will gain within the single job area, but this type of jobs is limited.) Within my own field, quantum mechanical calculation of the electronic structure of periodic atomic systems, the all required resources tend to grow with growth of the problem size. As such, a larger system (=more atoms) requires more CPU-time, but also more memory. This means that compute nodes with many cores are welcome and desired, but these cores need the associated memory. Doubling the cores would require the memory on a node to be doubled as well. Communication between the nodes should be fast as well, as this will be the main limiting factor on the scaling performance. If all this is implemented well, then the time to solution of a project (not a single calculation) will improve significantly with access to Exa-scale resources. The factor will not be 100x from a Pflops system, but could be much better than 10x. This factor 10 also takes into account that projects will have access to much more demanding calculations as a default (Hybrid functional structure optimization instead of simple density functional theory structure optimization, which is ~1000x cheaper for plane wave methods but is less accurate).

At this scale, parallelism is very important, and implementing this into a program is far from a trivial task. As most physicists/mathematicians/chemists/engineers may have the skills for writing scientifically sound software, we are not computer-scientists and our available time and skills are limited in this regard. For this reason, it will become more important for the HPC-facility to provide parallelization of software as a service. I.e. have a group of highly skilled computer scientists available to assist or even perform this task.

Next to having the best implementation of software available, it should also be possible to get access to these machines. This should not be limited to a happy few through a peer review process which just wastes human research potential. Instead access to these should be a mix of guaranteed access and peer review.

  • Guaranteed access: For standard production projects (5-25 million CPU hours/year) university researchers should have a guaranteed access model. This would allow them to perform state of the are research without too much overhead. To prevent access to people without the proven necessary need/skills it could be implemented that a user-database is created and appended upon each application. Upon first application, a local HPC-team (country/region/university Tier-1 infrastructure) would have to provide a recommendation with regard to the user, including a statement of the applicant’s resource usage at that facility. Getting resources in a guaranteed access project would also require a limited project proposal (max 2 pages, including user credentials, requested resources, and small description of the project)
  • Peer review access: This would be for special projects, in which the researcher requires a huge chunk of resources to perform highly specialized calculations or large High-throughput exercises (order of 250-1000 million CPU hours, e.g. Nature Communications 8, 15959 (2017)). In this case a full project with serious peer review (including rebuttal stage, or the possibility to resubmit after considering the indicated problems). The goal of this peer review system should not be to limit the number of accepted projects, but to make sure the accepted projects run successfully.
  • Pay per use: This should be the option for industrial/commercial users.

What could an HPC user as myself do to contribute to the success of EuroHPC? This is rather simple, run the machine as a pilot user (I have experience on most of the TIER-2 clusters of Ghent University and both Flemish Tier-1 machines. I successfully crashed the programs I am using by pushing them beyond their limits during pilot testing, and ran into rather unfortunate issues. 🙂 That is the job of a pilot user, use the machine/software in unexpected ways, such that this can be resolved/fixed by the time the bulk of the users get access.) and perform peer review of the lager specialized projects.

Now the only thing left to do is wait. Wait for the Exa-scale supercomputers to be build…7 years to go…about 92 node-days on Breniac…a starting grant…one long weekend of calculations.

Appendix

For simplicity I use the term CPU to indicate a single compute core, even though technically, nowadays a single CPU will contain multiple cores (desktop/laptop: 2-8 cores, HPC-compute node: 2-20 cores / CPU (or more) ). This to make comparison a bit more easy.

Furthermore, modern computer systems start more and more to rely on GPU performance as well, which is also a possible road toward Exa-scale computing.

Orders of magnitude:

  • G = Giga = 109
  • T = Tera = 1012
  • P = Peta = 1015
  • E = Exa = 1018

Permanent link to this article: https://dannyvanpoucke.be/exa-scale-computing/

Oct 18 2016

BrENIAC: the new Flemish TIER-1 Supercomputer.

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  • October 18, 2016

breniacYesterday was a good day for computational scientists in Flanders. The new TIER-1 machine, named BrENIAC, located at the university of Leuven, was inaugurated and is now officially open to all users of the Flemish university associations: UAntwerpen, VUB, UGhent, UHasselt, and KULeuven. The name refers to one of the first (super)computers ever built: ENIAC. This new machine will take over the task of the first TIER-1 machine (muk, located at the university of Ghent), which will be decommissioned at the end of this year. BrENIAC is ranked 196th in the current top 500 of supercomputers, and costs 5.5 M€. This is of course without the annual cost of power usage and technical personnel which will maintain the machine and provide support for the scientists running calculations. With its 580 compute nodes, containing 28 cores each (or 2 14-core CPU’s of the type Broadwell E5-2680v4), the number of available cores has roughly doubled. Also memory access should have improved, which gives rise to a theoretical threefold increase of the peak performance.

However, this peak performance is measured with “benchmark” tests, which tend to behave much better than real  life programs. This is because the average scientific programmer doesn’t write the best optimized code (ok, “commercial” programs these days may even behave worse :p )  for various reasons, time constraints being one of them. So my first task, before I start running my simulations on the new TIER-1 machine, will be to benchmark VASP and my own HIVE-code.

Two videos of my new sidekick:

 

You can see me in my front-row position in this picture taken during the non-academic part of the inauguration.

Permanent link to this article: https://dannyvanpoucke.be/breniac-en/

Mar 08 2016

New sidekick

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  • March 8, 2016

“One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them, one ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them” – J.R.R. Tolkien

“One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them, one ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them” – J.R.R. Tolkien

With the start of my new chapter, I also decided to finally buy a new laptop. It’s intended to replace the machine I used at work for the past six years, my desktop at home and my current little netbook. Of these the latter has been my true sidekick for the better part of the last decade. Although nearly all my calculations have been performed on various supercomputers in Belgium and The Netherlands, my little Asus Eee-pc 1000H, being one of the last vestiges of windows XP, was the one which I used to write nearly all of my publications, a PhD in Physics and in Chemistry, my FWO project proposal on MOFs, developed most of the HIVE toolbox, wrote the better part of this blog and website, developed and tested the agent-tutorials, and much more. In short, I did (and still do) protect it with my life.

With the unfortunate and in the end terminal shutdown of WIn XP (i.e. some people discovered how to detect the OS and link this to a kill event…just because XP no longer receives updates, and therefore suddenly becomes as leaky as a sieve 🙄 ) a new OS was needed. In addition, I also wanted some more resources for development (and just running a browser…It feels like programming skills are quickly deteriorating these days if you see how memory intensive even trivial applications are), so the new OS ended up being a new computer altogether. After some searching, I found the laptop which I hope to be using for the next decade: an Acer Predator 15. It has a nice intel skylake cpu (dual-threaded quad-core with 6Mb L3 cache, the 8Mb version was not to be found with the 32Gb of RAM I was looking for). The contrast with my netbook could not be greater, so I’ll be checking and comparing performance of my HIVE-code on this new machine to that on my old Asus netbook (dual-threaded atom cpu, with 1Gb of RAM) . This should give some interesting results.

Not having installed a new windows OS since 2007, windows 10 came as quite a shock (and the aftershocks are still coming.) It seems like privacy is a thing of the past. Anything you say, watch, type, draw is by default send to the home office, and distributed to third parties which may be interested in providing you “user specific content” (i.e. commercials 😥 ) This is in stark contrast to the days where people often installed several antivirus programs and firewalls to protect their data from hackers…now we just seem to throw that same information out for grabs. Then to say there are people who believe we are on the verge of the end of capitalism. I’m afraid they either are misreading the signs, or some are reading the signs very accurately and are collecting the new gold before it has been declared gold. I feel like I’m getting old, or just old-school.

One of the advantages of having lived through those early years where fear of internet-hackers and piracy were defaults, is that we also learned to get around all the same protections. Maybe you remember the irony of having to rip a CD to be able to simply listen to it because of all protection-software (and hardware when you rented it at the local library)? It seems those days are back. While installing some old games, I ran into a piracy-protection software (which is no longer supported due to security leaks) which blocked both playing and even installing the game. So you end up either buying the game through steam (as many will suggest you…why should I do that if I bought the game already…twice?) or installing it on an older machine, just brute-force copying the entire installed game, copying/installing missing dll’s and finding a no-cd crack (Yes, it is claimed as illegal, but since most machines these days come without optical drives I beg to differ), or figure out another way to play old games. In the end, you start with a feeling of victory before even playing a new round of Civilizations 4…which is nice and sad at the same time (it should not have been necessary).

Another interesting experience was the transfer of my emails from my UGent address to the UHasselt one. Mail-clients like Outlook and Thunderbird seem not that well adapted to easily handle such exercises (missing folders and emails upon copy-actions, which needed to be fixed manually), especially if you have a very extensive folder-structure. The most nasty problem I encountered when setting up accounts was the fact that the new UHasselt (gmail) account could not be linked to the thunderbird installation (even though the intermediate gmail-account for transferring my UGent mail was not that problematic). Apparently there was also a cookies option embedded in thunderbird itself, which should be switched on, woeps.

Two weeks after the start of my new chapter, most hurdles have been overcome. Nearly all necessary software has been installed (with or without the cooperation of the windows 10 OS  👿 ), my e-mail has been transferred, as well as 4Tb of data on the HPC systems (for which I am infinitely grateful to both the HPC teams of the UGent and UHasselt). Now it is time to start working again. Tomorrow, the diamond conference starts at the UHasselt, giving me the opportunity to quickly get involved in a new, additional field of materials.

 

Permanent link to this article: https://dannyvanpoucke.be/new-sidekick-en/