An opening and welcome to Does it Compute?
Here we'll give an overview of the event, house rules, and schedule.
Gone are the days of carefully maintained computer lab machines ("pets"); today's computational demands require computer labs that are elastic, cloud-native, infrastructure-as-code environments ("cattle"). This talk explores how the University of Groningen has transformed its traditional computer labs into modern on-premise cloud-first computer labs. We will have a closer look at the tools and...
At the European level, significant investments in HPC systems are continuing. This opens opportunities for addressing various grand challenges in science and society. In this talk we will review some selected trends and, in particular, discuss various challenges to further progress on providing HPC resources and services as well as to facilitate their efficient exploitation for relevant...
A cornerstone of modern, large-scale education is the use of various automated assessment methods to alleviate staff and improve the learning experience for students. Computing Science is a field that lends itself particularly well to assessment automation, given the well-defined nature of typical programming assignments.
In recent years, rapid growth of the Computing Science programme in...
The University of Groningen recently celebrated 60 years of computing at the university. A lot has changed in that time, but a constant factor is running calculations and analysis on our own hardware. Currently, this involves two clusters in two data centers and several petabytes of storage, built entirely with open source technologies. With this, we provide 2300+ researchers with computing...
Hábrók, the HPC cluster of the University of Groningen, has been operational for two years. In this talk I will discuss some highlights and challenges during these year and discuss future plans.
In this talk, I will share how large-scale molecular dynamics simulations are used to understand the behaviour of disease-related proteins and their regulation by molecular chaperones. This research, situated at the intersection of structural biology and computational science, relies heavily on the university's high-performance computing infrastructure, particularly Hábrók and Snellius. I will...
The HPC team of the University of Groningen is one of the main founders of the European Environment for Scientific Software Installations (EESSI). This collaborative project focuses on providing a common scientific software stack that can be used on virtually any Linux machine (and Windows, using WSL), including workstations, laptops, virtual machines, and HPC clusters.
By having this...
What if you could launch a full OS environment—with systemd, networking, persistent storage—in and full package management in milliseconds, not minutes? systemd-nspawn containers blur the line between containers and VMs, offering a drop-in, near-native performance without hypervisors.
In this talk, I’ll show you how to:
- Howto build and deploy VM-like nspawn containers
- Replace...
The rapid growth in large scale online data availability and the advancement of computational techniques have transformed the quantitative approach to social sciences. In this talk, I will explore how leveraging the Habrok cluster has empowered us to tackle complex sociological questions that were previously challenging due to methodological bottlenecks. Highlighting specific cases, such as...
As technology has progressed, the datacenter has become more important for IT education than ever before. Not only has it become more important than ever for students to know how to work with a datacenter and deploy applications to it, but giving students access to datacenter machines solves problems such as needing to run high-compute tasks not suited for the students' laptops (e.g....
CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) is home to the world's largest particle accelerator (Large Hadron Collider, LHC) that produces massive amounts of data each year. CERN's Storage and Data Management Group is responsible for enabling data storage and access for the CERN laboratory, in particular the long-term archival, preservation and distribution of LHC data to a worldwide...
At the UMCG radiotherapy department, cancer patients are treated with targeted radiation. To plan treatment, clinicians outline tumours and nearby healthy organs on CT scans. This step is crucial but time-consuming. Therefore, deep learning segmentation models are now used in the clinical workflow. However, their outputs still require human oversight, as accuracy varies between cases. The...
In this session we want to wrap-up the research track with a discussion on the future of compute clusters like Hábrók.
What kind of service(s) does the university need in the future for providing researchers with compute and storage?
We'll ask the audience to participate by responding to a couple of questions.
