Tan Chee Chiang, Research Computing, NUS Information Technology, on 21 January 2021
The last issue I shared about greater enterprise adoption of HPC resources and technologies due to the emergence of AI as a common application. This round we will look into how the NUS IT Research Computing (REC) team has evolved to stay relevant in this new HPC-AI era.
by Wang Junhong, Research Computing, NUS Information Technology , on 24 September 2020
Each month an intuitive usage profiling of HPC resources will be generated for every HPC user. This will improve user experience and allow users to understand how well their jobs are performing in the aspect of number of jobs completed, waiting time vs running time, parallel speedup performance, efficiency, and memory usage. Such usage profiling data will not only help users to identify room for improvement in either the parallel performance or the memory utilisation of their HPC jobs, but also improve the overall HPC resources utilisation and planning for future expansion. Read on for more details.
by Vamshidhar Gangu, Research Computing, NUS Information Technology, on 24 September 2020
One of the major complaints within R community is that it is very hard to maintain project level package dependencies as R is continuously evolving with several releases within a year.
The renv package is a new effort to bring project-local R dependency management to your projects. This is a robust, stable replacement for the Packrat package, with fewer surprises and better default behaviours.
By Tan Chee Chiang & Kuang Hao, Research Computing, NUS Information Technology, on 24 September 2020
Recent trends indicate that the proliferation of AI/ML applications has a positive effect on the adoption of HPC technologies by enterprises. We will analyse why that is happening and how it will benefit the HPC practitioners. This synergistic development of AI and HPC has also led to the renaming of this periodical to HPC-AI Newsletter.
By Tang Hongjian, Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, on 24 September 2020
Metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) have emerged as a versatile material due to their structural diversity and facile tunability. For practical application, it is highly desired to identify the best candidates with targeted properties among ~100,000 MOFs that have been experimentally reported. High-throughput computational screening paves a way to such demand, which has been successfully implemented in a broader research domain. Such method has been validated as time-efficient and technically practical. It shortlists candidate structures from the whole MOF database to boost experimental synthesis and performance evaluation. Our group supervised by Prof. Jiang Jianwen is specialized in this field.
By Kuang Hao, Research Computing, NUS Information Technology, on 24 September 2020
NLP (Natural Language Processing) is not easy. When you are getting interested in it, immediately you realize that raw texts cannot be fed to our machine who only understands 0s and 1s. To make things harder, meaning of words can be ambiguous; sentences’ interpretation varies depending on the context; and there are hundreds of languages with different syntax & grammar rules. Fortunately, thanks to recent pioneers in NLP, there are standardized pipelines to follow and easy-to-use tools at hand.
This article introduces the most popular tools in NLTK, how to set up and use them, as well as its availability on our HPC clusters.
By Yeo Eng Hee, Research Computing, NUS Information Technology, on 24 September 2020
The use of the Cloud to store data and to run HPC analysis jobs has become more pervasive, and one important question users of Cloud storage should ask is: “How secure is my data in the Cloud?”. While some cloud storage providers give users the assurance that their storage in the Cloud is encrypted, and some even provide encryption services and, key management services. It is always good to have an additional layer of assurance. We explore one such open-source tool for encrypting files and folders in the Cloud: Cryptomator, an open-source encryption tool that allows us to safely store the key to our data in our own computer, instead of in the Cloud.
By Ku Wee Kiat, Research Computing, NUS Information Technology, on 24 September 2020
As HPC users, we often work in the Linux terminal. We need to be productive in a pure text environment where the only interface you can use to control it is the keyboard. What you enter is what you get, if you do not execute the command to list a directory’s contents, you will not know what is inside the directory. So how can we do the things in the most productive way? Yes, by using shortcuts!
By Kumar Sambhav, Research Computing, NUS Information Technology, on 24 September 2020
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are an approach to do generative modelling using deep learning methods. GANs comprise of competing neural networks that try to outperform each other at a given task. Given a dataset, GANs try to generate synthetic datasets which have similar statistical properties as the given dataset.
By Tang Haibin, Research Fellow, Mechanical Engineering, on 24 September 2020
A personal account on how computational efficiency of research work is improved when running in HPC Cloud
