Rakesh K. Yadav Jeremy Bloxham PNAS June 23, 2020 117 "The hexagonal flow pattern on Saturn is a striking example of turbulent self-organization. However, the mechanism of its formation and its depth remain unclear. There are two hypotheses: in one, the hexagon is shallow, extending to depths ranging from tens to hundreds of kilometers; in the other, it extends to thousands…
2020 Year-End Recap and a Look Back at FASRC
2020 - A year full of changes 2020 began somewhat normally, except that the world was coming to grips with a global pandemic. By February plans were being formed for a probable change to 100% remote work for FASRC staff. This became a reality in March and we bid our offices in '38' farewell for some indeterminate time. This…
A Retrospective Odyssey
by Paul Edmon December 2, 2020 Back in 2008, the Odyssey supercomputer was installed on the seventh floor of the Markely-Boston co-location data center at 1 Summer Street, Boston, Massachusetts. Until this point Harvard had not really been a player in the realm of supercomputing, unlike other major universities who had been doing so for decades. However with Odyssey Harvard…
Congratulations to Madelyn Cain for JobID 1!
by Paul Edmon, September 1, 2020 One of the features of our scheduling software, Slurm, is that it has a max JobID of 67,043,328 (for the fascinating reason why see the Slurm docs). This means that when we hit that limit the JobID rolls over to 1 and starts counting again from there. We thought this would be a fun…
Summer 2020 datacenter consolidation
On-going work July - ? in our Boston data center Due to scheduling of resources around pandemic guidelines and rules, as well as scheduling with the data center and vendors, an end date is not yet known. As part of cost-savings plans, FASRC and Harvard Medical School will be combining space in our Boston data center. This allows FASRC, HMS,…
The Milky Way’s giant, wave-like collection of gas
Astronomers at Harvard University have discovered a monolithic, wave-shaped gaseous structure - the largest ever seen in our galaxy - made up of interconnected stellar nurseries. Dubbed the “Radcliffe Wave” in honor of the collaboration’s home base, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the discovery transforms a 150-year-old vision of nearby stellar nurseries as an expanding ring into one featuring…
New scratchlfs02 online, see details
Dec 18, 2019 As most of you know, the scratchlfs system has exhibited performance issues and instability for some time. We're pleased to announce that a replacement system has been delivered, built, tested, benchmarked, and is ready for your use now at /n/scratchlfs02 . Along with regular monthly maintenance on January 13th, 2020 ( https://www.rc.fas.harvard.edu/monthly-maintenance ), some changes…
Holidays and Tech: Your first computer
A bit of fun before the holiday break. One thing that people in our profession can count on is 'your first computer'. There is one for each of us, and generally they hold a special place in our hearts and very often they're tied to holidays or birthdays. We did an impromptu survey of FASRC (as well as with some…
Cannon makes super-computing Top 500 List
The November 2019 Top 500 List has just added Cannon, and we're very pleased to say we've ranked #144 overall and # 7 on the US academic list. We and the Harvard FAS are very proud to have Cannon in such a prominent position in the list. It demonstrates Harvard's commitment to pushing the envelope to provide its researchers with…
On Artificial Intelligence
by Paul Edmon, November 20, 2019 Currently in the realm of computer science there is no hotter topic than Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). However as this slide deck from Professor Arvind Narayanan at Princeton notes there is also a lot of snake oil going around too. Thus an understanding of AI is important in our current day…
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