VPP300 News

MOLPRO97.4 has been installed on the VPP300 (installed 6 July 1998) To use molpro add to your .cshrc

      setenv MOLPRO
      source /opt/etc/system_cshrc

• See man molpro on how to run the code
• Manuals are on the WWW under http://anusf.anu.edu.au/PC/software/molpro.html
• You MUST set the environment variable MOLPRO_SCRDIR in your job script, e.g.
  setenv MOLPRO_SCRDIR /short/abc123
  or
  setenv MOLPRO_SCRDIR $MRFSDIR
  to use MRFS
• Postscript documentation is in $MOLPRO/doc
• Example jobs are in $MOLPRO/testjobs and $MOLPRO/examples
• The code has been verified by running the standard testjobs found in $MOLPRO/testjobs. Output from these jobs are in $MOLPRO/testjobs/ANUSF_OUT. (The example jobs and the non standard test jobs have not been run and verified - so tread carefully!)
• Questions/comments contact Alistair.Rendell@anu.edu.au

The ANU VPP300 is the first university based machine to be upgraded to Fujitsu's X98031 standard package. In particular, new versions of the following were installed:

UXPV, NQS, F90/VP, C/VP, C Language, Analyzer, SSL2/VP and PVM

This update includes many useful fixes, especially in the area of compilers. Our VPP release notes page includes the specific details of all VPP updates.

The Fujtisu VPP300 Manual pages and release notes have been updated.

Courses on Fortran90, VPP vectorization and tuning and the MPI library will be given in the weeks of June 22nd to July 3rd.

Fortran90 and vectorizing C compilers for the VPP are now available on covpp. The commands are frtvpp and vcc and accept all the same options as frt and vcc on the vpp (beware - there is also a Solaris frt on covpp!). In general, these compilers offer faster turnaround than compiling on the vpp itself. We encourage users to use covpp as much as possible for source editing and compiling to alleviate some of the congestion on vpp00.

Note that you may need to make copies of certain include files, particularly for packages in /opt on the vpp. There is NO need to make copies of libraries - linking is done via an rsh to the vpp.

Cross-compilers for the VPPFortran parallelizing compiler is expected shortly. If you have any problem let anusf know.

MPTools is a profiling/performance analysis tool for VPP message passing programs. It provides a GUI running on covpp to analyse profiling data created by a previous vpp parallel program - see MPTools

In addition to the recent implementation of a 100Mb/s FDDI downlink to the backbone, we have now introduced a 155Mb/s ATM switch. The new switch is internally networked between VPP, covpp, the Power Challenge, Onyx and the Mass Data Store (store). Network traffic automatically flows though the ATM switch when communicating between these machines, while the FDDI is used for all other communication to production machines. See the VPP hardware page for more information.

The main campus backbone link from campus has been increased from a shared 10Mb/s ethernet switch to a dual ring 100Mb/s FDDI network. This will enable larger data transfer speeds to be achieved with campus users on Fast Ethernet (100Mb/s) backbone downlinks.

Another VPP course announced.

The latest versions of all Fujitsu manuals are now available on the web and will replace the Olias versions on covpp. The manuals are in two locations:

• one for ANU internal access only
• the other for restricted External access - contact anusf for the password details

The Fujitsu software release notes are now being transferred to the web. The currently installed version of software can be found in the software area.

During the the downtime of Sunday 6/7, a new version of the vectorised C subsystem was installed. This subsystem improves the vectorisation of C code when using the vectorising compiler vcc.

Significant changes have been made to the queues.
bigmem and long queue no longer exist (they are part of normal queue) and users MUST specify the job cputime limit by giving the -lT hh:mm:ss option to nqsub.

The latest version of gaussian (g94e2) is now the default gaussian.

Our first VPP course announced.

A major upgrade of the VPP hardware and software has occurred. Five PEs now have 2GBs of memory (PEs 7-11) and PE12 is now an IO PE (i.e. it has disks attached to it). The operating system has been upgraded to supported a second IO PE.

There have been changes to the file systems and NQS queues - please read the details.

All queues now allow 416MB jobs to be submitted. Please only use the memory that you require.

The VPP300 is in its acceptance testing phase. We expect this to have little effect on users apart from possible IO benchmarking in the second week.

Acceptance testing postponed until IO hardware replaced.

C++ compiler installed.

Users can now order and buy copies of the VPP manuals.

To use scratch space on /vfllocal, you should use the getjobscr command from within your job to reserve space. See the getjobscr man page for the reason why.

Now that the queues are getting a little longer, an option ("-s") has been added to nqstat for abbreviated output. See the nqstat man page for further details.

Normal, high and bonus queues are now all 4 hour queues and a 10 hour queue called long has been introduced - see the NQS queue table for full details.

The VPP is available for general use. Some tuning of the system (in particular IO) is still required but we hope the system is now in a production state.