{"id":3337,"date":"2011-03-17T13:11:16","date_gmt":"2011-03-17T12:11:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.walkingrandomly.com\/?p=3337"},"modified":"2011-03-17T13:11:16","modified_gmt":"2011-03-17T12:11:16","slug":"why-i-love-my-job-1-high-throughput-computing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/?p=3337","title":{"rendered":"Why I love my job #1: High Throughput Computing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Part of my job at the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.manchester.ac.uk\/\">University of Manchester<\/a> is to help support the use of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cs.wisc.edu\/condor\/htc.html\">High Throughput Computing<\/a> (HTC) services.\u00a0 I am part of a team that works within Manchester&#8217;s Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences (Physics,Chemistry,Maths,Engineering,Computer Science,Earth Sciences) but we don&#8217;t just work with &#8216;our&#8217; schools; we also collaborate with teams from all over the University along with the central Research Support team.<\/p>\n<p>For example, say you are a University of Manchester researcher and have written a monte-carlo simulation in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mathworks.co.uk\/\">MATLAB<\/a> where a typical run takes 5 hours to complete.  In order to get good results you might want to run this simulation 1000 times which is going to take your desktop machine quite a while; about 7 months in fact!  You can either wait for 7 months or you can contact us for assistance.  We&#8217;ll then do the following for you:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Attempt to optimise your MATLAB code.  Recent speed-ups range from 10% to 20,000%<\/li>\n<li>Give you access to our <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cs.wisc.edu\/condor\/\">Condor<\/a> pool (currently peaking at 1600 processor cores, more expected in the near future)<\/li>\n<li>Assist you in modifying your code and writing script wrappers to make best use of those 1600 cores.<\/li>\n<li>If appropriate, put you in touch with colleagues who support traditional HPC (High Performance Computing) supercomputers, GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) and similar technology.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Once we&#8217;ve done our bit, you throw your code at our Condor pool and get your results in less than an evening!  Obviously we are not confined to MATLAB; we&#8217;ve also assisted users of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.python.org\/\">Python<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wolfram.com\/mathematica\/\">Mathematica<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/C_%28programming_language%29\">C<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Fortran\">FORTRAN<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/ambermd.org\/\">Amber<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/morphy.mib.man.ac.uk\/\">Morphy<\/a> and many more.\u00a0 Our job is to help researchers do research more quickly!<\/p>\n<p>For a mathy science geek with a penchant for mathematical software it really doesn&#8217;t get much better than this!\u00a0 I get to play with high end hardware and the latest software, I get to learn new areas of science and mathematics and I get to work with world-leading experts in a multitude of fields.\u00a0 More importantly, I get to make a real difference.<\/p>\n<p>Yep, this is one part of my job that I really love.\u00a0 Expect to see more articles on High Throughput Computing and technologies such as Condor on WalkingRandomly in the very near future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Part of my job at the University of Manchester is to help support the use of High Throughput Computing (HTC) services.\u00a0 I am part of a team that works within Manchester&#8217;s Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences (Physics,Chemistry,Maths,Engineering,Computer Science,Earth Sciences) but we don&#8217;t just work with &#8216;our&#8217; schools; we also collaborate with teams from all [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[48,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3337","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-condor","category-walking-randomly"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3swhs-RP","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3337","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3337"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3337\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3338,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3337\/revisions\/3338"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}