DiRAC Day

Attendees

Venue

The conference will be located at the College Court Conference Centre, Knighton Road, Leicester, LE2 3UF: https://collegecourt.co.uk/

Travel options

By car:
College Court is conveniently located within easy reach of the M1 and M69 motorways. For satellite navigation, use postcode LE2 3TQ. College Court offers ample complimentary car parking spaces.

By train:
College Court is only 1.4 miles from Leicester Train Station, where guests can travel only 70 minutes from central London. Taxis are available at Leicester Train Station.

By air:
East Midlands Airport is also located less than 30 minutes away and Birmingham International Airport only 45 minutes.

Accommodation

Accommodation is available at College Court Conference Centre, Knighton Road, Leicester, LE2 3UF: https://collegecourt.co.uk/

To reserve accommodation, please either call College Court on 0116 244 9669 or email reservations@collegecourt.co.uk

Please quote reference 60767 in order to receive a preferential rate before 17 July.

To guarantee a reservation, we recommend you to book as soon as possible.

Accommodation costs (which include the discount code 60767):
Standard bedroom £82.00
Executive bedroom £97.00
Executive with balcony bedroom £102.00
Suite bedroom £122.00

(Based on single occupancy, for double occupancy an additional charge of £15.00 per night will apply).

Check in time is 14.00 onwards.
Check out time is 10.00 a.m. Monday – Friday.
Breakfast is served between 7.30 – 9.30 a.m.

Prices are inclusive of full English breakfast, complimentary cark parking and wi-fi access.

Please note that a credit/debit card will be required to secure the reservation.

Should you require a ground floor or accessible room, please inform College Court when making the reservation.

Programme

Wednesday 11 September

Welcome reception, College Court Conference Centre.

Thursday 12 September

Held on the first floor of the College Court Conference Centre. Exhibitors and posters are located in the Chestnut and Birch rooms, first floor of College Court.

Morning session

Located in the Oak Room.

Parallel Session 1

Located in the Oak Room, left hand side.

Parallel Session 2

Located in the Oak Room, right hand side.

ARM Mellanox Hackathon

From 9^th-11^th September (immediately before DiRAC Day on Sept 12^th), DiRAC are pleased to be hosting a hackathon at Leicester focussed on two novel technologies:

1. Arm processors – use the HPE/Suse/Arm Catalyst UK cluster hosted at Leicester, to explore whether your code can benefit from the enhanced memory bandwidth offered by the Thunder X2 processors. In addition, codes which are found to perform well on Arm cores will be able to access (potentially significant amounts of) time on this 4096-core cluster at Leicester in the period before it is handed over to the DiRAC RAC and the University of Leicester to go into full production.

1. Mellanox Bluefield – explore the potential benefits of offloading parts of your science calculations onto the additional compute capacity available within the next generation of network switches. 

Technical experts from both Arm and Mellanox will be attending to provide assistance and advice on porting your code and/or modifying it to take advantage of the new hardware.  DiRAC users who have attended previous hackathons have found them to be very productive, providing an opportunity to benefit from the expertise of colleagues around DiRAC as well as from the industry partners.

If you would like to attend, please complete the application form.

The deadline for applications is 10am on Monday, 22^nd July.

We are very grateful to both Arm and Mellanox for sponsoring this event which means that attendance will be free of charge, and we will be able to contribute towards accommodation costs of attendees.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact either Richard Regan (DiRAC Training Manager; richard.regan@durham.ac.uk) or Mark Wilkinson (miw6@leicester.ac.uk).

Registration

Registration will close 30 August.

DiRAC Day provides an opportunity to meet others from the DiRAC HPC community, learn about what is being done by all the different consortia, present and view posters on recent research achievements and discuss training and support needs for DiRAC. DiRAC users will also have the chance to meet members of the technical support teams for each DiRAC service machine in person as well as to interact with the industry vendors who supplied the hardware we are now exploiting.

DiRAC Day gratefully acknowledges support from our sponsors:

8th Annual DiRAC Science Day
12th September 2018
Swansea University

On September 12th, Swansea University will host the 8th Annual DiRAC Science Day. The day provides an opportunity to meet others from the DiRAC HPC community, learn about what is being done by all the different consortia, present and view posters on recent research achievements and discuss training and support needs for DiRAC. DiRAC users will also have the chance to meet members of the technical support teams in person as well as interact with the industry vendors who supplied the hardware we are now exploiting.

All attendees are encouraged to bring a poster to present (subject to space availability). There will be two prizes awarded to the posters by students or PDRAs judged to be ‘the best’.

Registration for DiRAC Day is via Swansea University’s dedicated DiRAC Day website, where you can also find a link to Accommodation Booking on the Swansea University campus.

This year there are three other interesting events being held at Swansea University which co-incide with DiRAC Day….

Co-located Events
NVidia Hackathon
9th, 10th & 11th September

DiRAC is pleased to announce that Nvidia have generously agreed to sponsor a 3-day GPU hackathon in Swansea prior to DiRAC Day 2018. This event will provide the DiRAC community with the opportunity to explore the potential for GPUs in supporting their science.

The Hackathon is open to all DiRAC HPC users and we expect to be able to offer places to 5 or 6 teams of between 3 and 5 people each. Over the three days, we hope that several major DiRAC science codes will be ported to GPUs and that the teams who attend will gain the skills to assist other DiRAC researchers to port additional codes in the future.

More information, including the application form can be found here.

Hands-on Introduction to Data Visualisation
13th & 14th September

Swansea University are hosting a stand-alone training course on Data Visualisation to run on the 13th and 14th September. The event will provide delegates with a concise introduction to the art and science of applied data visualisation.

More information on this course can be found here.

SuperComputing Wales Research Symposium 2018
13th September

The Swansea Academy of Advanced Computing are bringing together the Supercomputing Wales community to give users a forum to showcase their research to the wider HPC community and network with other supercomputing specialists.

The event will include research talks, a poster session, and opportunities for discussion about the Supercomputing Wales project and SUNBIRD machine.

More information on this event can be found here.

(Featured Image Credit: Swansea University, UK)