CNRS Cristal

This year, the CNRS has decided to reward the work of the PLMteam with a crystal. The PLM (Platform in Line for Mathematics) is a national infrastructure distributed in mathematics laboratories, managed within the framework of the RT Mathrice of the CNRS, by a technical team distributed geographically.
Its partnership with GRICAD, under the aegis of INSMI, will enable PLM to take the turn of cloud computing.
Congratulations to Laurent Azema who joins the GRICAD system team and will lead the Datacentre Technical Committee, in the same spirit of cooperation of its members towards a common achievement in the service of the research.

Evolution of infrastructures for AI and computing on GPU

In recent months, demand from GPU computing research communities, especially AI, has grown significantly. To meet this growing need, GRICAD added 4 new GPU compute nodes in the DAHU cluster. GRICAD, through this cluster, provides Grenoble research staff and their collaborators with 6 GPU nodes, ie a total of 24 NIVIDA Tesla V100 GPUs (32GB of RAM per GPU). It should be noted that these nodes are very similar to the GPU / IA nodes that the supercomputer of the IDRIS (national computing center CNRS) Jean Zay.
We have also made it possible, in our cloud computing service called NOVA, the deployment of virtual machines ( VM) on demand including GPUs. If you do not have strong performance needs but are in a testing / code development / prototyping phase, do not hesitate to orient yourself towards this service, which is more flexible, flexible and versatile.

Data Cell (Cellule Data) seminar : online recording and presentation

This seminar "Data Management Plan (DMP)" occured on 30 april 2021 online.
Seminar recording is available on this link.
And presentation slides.

Storage of research data Seminary

The Data Unit of the Grenoble Alpes site, INIST-CNRS and URFIST in Lyon organizer of a series of online events dedicated to Storage of research data . A first national seminar addressing the general issues of will be supplemented by local sessions at some sites partners of the event. These for but to present the solutions storage facilities set up at the local level and will target more particularly to the scientific communities of the sites concerned.
The general seminar took place on May 25, 2021 from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. by videoconference. On the program: types of storage? Where and how to store data ? How to organize and document your data? Links with open science ...
To access the resources of this session Information on other sessions will be disseminated. All these events are accessible without prior registration.

Reproducible Research Seminar

April 6 and 9, 2021

MaiMoSiNE, GRICAD and the SARI network are organizing two half-day online seminars around reproducible research to bring together a network of skills in the Grenoble area.
- Tuesday April 6, 2021 morning: Part I - Introduction, ethical, legal, environmental issues
- Friday April 9, 2021 afternoon: Part II - reproducible good research practices in more targeted research communities
A more detailed program will soon be available on MaiMoSiNE's website.

Mantis 2

GRICAD's new distributed storage infrastructure, MANTIS V2 is now available to all users of GRICAD computing machines. It replaces the MANTIS infrastructure which, after more than 10 years of good and loyal service, had become obsolete.
As a reminder, MANTIS (V1 or V2) is an iRODS distributed storage cloud available from all the compute nodes of the GRICAD HPC infrastructure. It is an efficient way to store the input data or the outputs of the simulations carried out on the various calculation servers of GRICAD. It is powerful (because storage is spread across multiple nodes), capacitive, and expandable (labs can easily help expand storage capacity by adding new 250TB nodes), and provides a programmable rules engine.
With an expandable overall volume of 750TB, each user is allocated one terabyte of space to store their data. To request an extension of this space, do not hesitate to contact us at gricad-contact@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr
For more information, you can read the documentation at this address: https: // gricad- doc.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/hpc/data_management/mantis/

1st Data Cell (Cellule Data) seminar : online recording and presentation

As part of the support around research data, the Data Cell (Cellule Data) of the Grenoble Alpes site start a series of seminars in order to inform and discuss the subject.
The 1st seminar "Presentation of the Data Cell and its support actions" occured on 5 mars 2021 online.
Seminar recording is available on this link.
And presentation slides.

Doctoral College Courses

March 23, 2021

Within the framework of the College des Ecoles Doctorales, the Data Cell of the Grenoble Alpes site offers training on research data entitled "How to manage your data well to facilitate your doctoral work? Issues and good practices". The objective is to know the practical and concrete tools for an effective management of its research. All information is online: on the dedicated website.

Data Cell Seminary

March 5th, 2021

As part of the support around research data, the Data Cell (Cellule Data) of the Grenoble Alpes site will start a series of seminars in order to inform and discuss the subject. The 1st seminar will be devoted to the presentation of the Data Cell and its support actions on research data. It will take place on Friday the 5th of March from 11 a.m. to 12 p.m. on this link.

National Training Action

January 18 to 26, 2021

GRICAD supports the organization of the training action UST4HP (User Tools for HPC), proposed by the Computation and ResInfo networks, which takes place from 18 to 26 January 2021.
This year, the main theme will be reproducibility in HPC environments. Due to the health conditions, the courses and practical work will take place online.
The information is online.

Deep Learning Training

January 14, 2021

GRICAD and Nvidia join forces to offer a Deep Learning training day on January 14, 2021. The information is online .

PIA3 / Equipex+ Projects

GRICAD is a partner of 3 PIA3 / Equipex+ projects that have been selected for funding:

• MesoNet, the network of mesocentres, a project led by GENCI.
• Gaia Data, , whose objective is to strengthen the infrastructures of earth sciences, where GRICAD is associated with OSUG.
• TIRREX, infrastructure for the robotics community.

Doctoral College Courses

January 11 to April 30, 2021

Within the framework of the Collège des écoles doctorales and MaiMosSiNE several scientific computing training courses are available. They are mainly intended for doctoral students but also (limited number of places ...) for researchers/engineers from Grenoble research institutes. Please note that this year, the courses take place in distance learning. All information on the dedicated website

Labellisation Code of Conduct pour le Datacenter IMAG

Thanks to the work carried out by the GRICAD / UGA datacenter technical committee, the IMAG building datacenter has just been labeled by the European Union Joint Research Center (EU-JRC). To know more about the Code of Conduct.

SAVE THE DATE : GRICAD User day 2020

November the 2nd and the 3rd

The next GRICAD User Day will be held on monday 2nd and tuesday 3rd November 2020, in visioconference. More informations on the website: https://jug2020.sciencesconf.org/

Grille de stockage haute capacité MANTIS-2

MANTIS is a storage platform initially intended for inputs / outputs of "grid" type calculations, which are capable of bring into play the CPU resources of all the computing machines managed or co-managed by Gricad. It offers a large storage capacity accessible directly from any computation node and allows the storage of transient data or that must be accessed from heterogeneous sources. This scalable distributed platform driven by "iRods" middleware has been running since 2011 and had reached the size of 1.2 petabytes spread over about fifteen servers. Today, GRICAD has just put MANTIS-2 into production, a second similar platform, also managed under iRods and intended for replace the first grind shortly. It already offers 750 terabytes delivered by only 3 servers. Its capacity and performance are therefore highly scalable, by simply adding 250 base bricks terabytes. In addition, it benefits from better synchronization at Gricad authentication system (Perseus), removing the problematic dissociation of connection keys. Users will soon be invited to migrate their data from MANTIS to MANTIS-2.

Good Practice Guide for the EU Code of Conduct on Data Centre Energy Efficiency

The GRICAD/UGA Datacenter Technical Committee translated the Good Practice Guide for the EU Code of Conduct on Energy Efficiency in Datacenters 2019 for the GDS EcoInfo. This guide is available on line.

Virtual workshop on DMPs

The Data stewarship committee is organizing a virtual workshop on Data Management Plans on July 7.

Support for the Alcov2 project

GRICAD participated in the implementation of the Alcov2 survey for the study of the transmission of the new coronavirus in French households conducted by a Parisian research team.
This survey is aimed at all households French having possibly experienced, even without certainty, the presence of the new coronavirus during the containment period. It will make it possible to better understand the modes of transmission in households but also in transportation, schools, places of work, gathering places, etc.
Contact : alcov2@lpsm.paris

Estimated carbon footprint of one hour per computing core

This study is the result of work carried out within the framework of GRICAD's actions to reduce its environmental impact.
Find the complete article on the dedicated page.

Integration of the cloud to France Grilles

Thanks to the efforts of the entire Openstack technical committee, and more particularly of Remi Cailletaud, the GRICAD "Nova" cloud is now part of France Grilles Research Infrastructure

Involvement in the fight against Covid-19

GRICAD, thanks to its "Nova" cloud, supports several projects around the Covid-19, in particular data collection and analysis, as well as MODCOV19 coordination:

• the projet EX-COVID-19, carried by Laboratoire Impact de l'activité physique sur la santé (IAPS)
• the projet FAC, Face au Covid, carried by two laboratories of the INS2I (CNRS): the laboratoire d’Analyse et de Modélisation de Systèmes pour l’Aide à la Décision (LAMSADE) and the le Département Informatique de l'ENS (DIENS)

Our cloud platform: : https://gricad-cloud.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/ .