1st HPAC Platform Training Event

Which tools and services do the HPAC Platform (and Fenix) offer?

SP7, the High Performance Analytics and Computing (HPAC) Platform of the HBP offers a number of services to neuroscience users, including scalable and interactive compute resources (made available via the Interactive Computing e-Infrastructure, aka ICEI, allocations) data storage and transfer services, continuous integration and software deployment services, and platform integration services.  This session will give an overview of these various services including concrete examples.  Subsequent sessions that follow will serve to elaborate further on the details of their use.

PRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe, has the mission to enable high-impact scientific discovery to enhance European competitiveness for the benefit of society, by offering world class computing resources and complementary services. This includes the coordination of training and education activities in High-Performance Computing through the six PRACE Advanced Training Centres (PATC) established in Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and United Kingdom. PATC courses share a centralised academic curriculum that ranges from beginner to advanced levels, from general usage of HPC systems to training in domain-specific applications. PATCs courses are funded by the PRACE Implementation Phase projects, and are free of charge for both academic and industrial users.

In this session, users will learn how to access the supercomputers in the HPAC platform from Jupyter notebooks in the HBP Collaboratory. The session covers the basics of the REST APIs that allow for discovering the available supercomputers, learning about access rights, creating and submitting simple jobs and parallel jobs, listing files and uploading/downloading data. Users will learn how to create and run workflows, in which the applications run on systems at different sites, and how to deploy their own application or service and make it available to HBP researchers.
Users without an HPC allocation will be provided with test accounts.

Perform large data transfer within the HPB HPAC Platform using the UFTP Protocol.

To give users the ability to move datasets between the sites that are part of the HPAC Platform, a transfer service based on UNICORE File Transfer Protocol (UFTP) was deployed and configured.
UFTP is a high-performance data transfer library based on FTP, fully integrated with the UNICORE authentication mechanisms and accessible via UNICORE Rest API and different UNICORE clients.

During the session, users will learn how to transfer large data between the HPAC sites via both the Collaboratory and the UNICORE Commandline Client

Simulator NEST

Simulator Arbor

Interactive visual analysis tools become more and more an integral part of various data analysis processes in Neuroscience. These tools are used for the exploration of small, medium or large data sets, to make neuroscientific phenomena visible for teaching and education, or for communication purposes in regard of presenting research results to the scientific community in form of publications or to the public. This session will present a broad overview of what visualizations is capable of, how visualization can be used and how the right tool can be found for a specific research question. By means of a case study, we will present the potential of web-based visualization tools and their potential use for the analysis of NEST data.