jonathan@researchcomputingteams.org
Hi!
As we get ready to move our team from one institution to another, we’re taking the opportunity to reconsider how we do things on our team and reset expectations about how we operate and what we’re aiming to achieve - as a team, and as a project. The switch to working from home was an earlier opportunity to clarify and reset, too.
In Canada, 77% of IT organizations say that expectations around everyone going to the office everyday have been changed probably irreversably by the pandemic. With universities, hospitals, and research institutes constantly tight on space, I have to think that a lot of our organizations are having similar conversations. In the jobs section, there’s a first for the newsletter - a manager position listed a remote position. At your org, are people discussing having work from home being a serious option in the future? Is anyone considering operating as a fully- or mostly-distributed team indefinitely?
On to the link roundup:
New Manager Training: The 4 concepts to Teach - Claire Lew, Know Your Team
Being Glue - Tanya Reilly
If you’re at the point where you’re starting to manage (or groom) team leads or managers, Clair Lew’s article and collection of resources on four things to teach new managers is useful. Her four concepts to teach (which she covers in details with resources to use to to teach them are):
Tanya Reilly’s talk focuses an aspect the first one - that as a manager, an increasing amount of your time is spent doing”glue work” rather than the technical work of the team. And while that glue work is necessary for everything to come together (and stay together), it isn’t as valued as the technical work. So much so that ICs stepping up and doing that glue work aren’t seen as overreaching or as promotion material, but more often as being less capable than the ICs focussed on the nuts and bolts of their tasks.
The Manager’s Guide to Inclusive Leadership — Small Habits That Make a Big Impact - First Round Review
This is a really nice article that’s well worth your time about more inclusive leadership. They give some four high-level topics:
But then go relatively deeply into each of them and give specific questions you can ask and approaches you can take. The contributors are trainers at LifeLabs Learning, which leads training and facilitation around Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) and the article links to a much longer 25-page open-sourced playbook for starting up a DEI team which also looks promising.
You Might Not Be Hearing Your Team’s Best Ideas - Michael Parke and Elad N. Sherf, HBR
We’ve talked about the importance of disagreement and input before, and how important it is that people feel ok speaking up. This is another article on the topic, and it breaks the steps down into managing what people are saying but also managing the silence, what people aren’t saying, which I think is a useful way to think about things.
How to “manage up” from home- The Economist
Since many of us have been working from home for the past three months, it’s been harder managing our team, but maybe even harder being visible to our bosses (and other senior stakeholders) and maintaining those connections.
As with our teams, there’s no magic here - we just need to do what we should always be doing, communicating, listening, and documenting. And as with our team, while we could get away with being less explicit and intentional about some of these steps when we were all in an office together, distance means we need to put more discipline into these sorts of actions.
From UBC: an open access resource for teaching online - Tony Bates
The pandemic has shifted expectations about how we deliver training and education; that shift might be long-lasting.
Now that many of us have gotten past the emergency, ”let’s just make this work” phase, it may be useful to have team members start a more comprehensive training program. The Online Teaching Program of University of British Columbia’s Centre for Teaching, Learning, and Technology has made their Online Teaching Program modules for faculty available more widely. There’s a lot of good material there, and the material itself is a good model for teaching online.
Draft of my perf book is ready! - Dens Bakhvalov
A draft of Denis Bakhvalov’s book, ”Performance Analysis and Tuning on Modern CPU” is available for review, and will be available for free by PDF when it is final.
This is a very low-level book on performance on modern CPUs, discussing speculative execution, branch misprediction, instruction-level parallelism issues, and the like. I look forward to seeing this out in its final form.
Update from GENCI: A journey of optimizing applications on Arm platforms - Fabrice Dupros, Christelle Piechursk, Laurent Nguyen and Cyril Mazauric
A blog post describing GENCI’s (France’s HPC organization) ~18-month long process on porting and optimizing 8 HPC applications for ARM, focusing on getting the most out of vector performance and tuning MPI parameters, using emulators and eventually real hardware.
Open Software Packaging for Science - QuantStack
An opensource, fast replacement for conda-forge and for conda package hosting. Interesting to see work being done on sustainability and openness of package repositories. Also, it uses libsolv, a very fast SAT solver, for meeting versioning constraints. SAT solvers are scandalously underused - if your project ever finds itself needing to solving a bunch of binary constraints, don’t do it yourself any more than you’d hand-implement linear algebra packages — use a SAT solver.
Simplifying HPC Workflows with NVIDIA NGC Container Environment Modules - Akhil Docca and Scott McMillan, NVIDIA
A blog post announcing NVIDIA’s open source ”Container Environment modules” tool - a very cute setup that uses Lua-based Lmod and Singularity containers to let users run, e.g. ’module load gromacs’ and have the gmx command run a Gromacs Singularity container with NVIDIA GPU support. Even slicker, if the latest container hasn’t been pull-ed yet, the first instance of running gmx will pull it down.
Supporting the Transformative Impact of Research Infrastructures on European Research - ESFRI
European research infrastructures ‘not financially sustainable’ - Ben Upton, Research Professional News (Paywalled)
An expert panel has taken a look at the current financial sustainability of European research infrastructures (whichincludes but is not limited to digital research infrastructure). Despite a push for sustainability over the past several years, there’s still no systemic financial sustainability for these Europe-wide ”core facilities” for research
From the executive summary of the report:
However, issues of misalignment of national roadmap exercises and funding plans for RIs need to be overcome to make the implementation of the full RI system supporting the European Research Area (ERA) more time efficient and cost-effective. Despite long-term sustainability being increasingly emphasised in EU funding instrument call texts, this issue remains challenging for the vast majority of RIs. We find that few RIs outside the European Intergovernmental Research Organisation forum (EIROforum) grouping are able to demonstrate the characteristics required to achieve long-term sustainability. In addition, we note that unique research infrastructures are also operated by networks and that the full deployment of competitive research services in Europe cannot be pursued by implementing an ever-growing number of autonomous legal RI entities.
The report calls for member governments to step up and align funding, for better ”life cycle management” and maturity assessments of the research infrastructures, more integration activities, and better coordination across funding pillars.
The report is very comprehensve, and has overviews of ~40 such EU-wide infrastructures; it’s interesting reading if this is your jam. (It is mine)
The Runbooks Project - Ian Mieli
In an effort to help get people started with runbooks for operations, Ian Miele of Container Soltuions has started an opensource set of runbooks, the Open Runbooks Project, starting with their own. Worth checking out as a set of templates, and keeping an eye on as more get added.
Rust for Data-Intensive Computation - Frank McSherry
Frank McSherry, of differential privacy and timely dataflow fame, has a blog post out on his company’s site on the use of Rust for data-intensive computation:
Specifically, I’ve found several of Rust’s key idioms line up very well with the performance and correctness needs of data-intensive computing.
He describes the benefits of Rust’s approach to generics (traits), and use of higher-level programming with closures, for work in this space. Maybe more controversially, he suggests Rust’s focus on ownership, borrowing, and lifetimes is a relatively low bar as well as helpful for data-intensive work:
Fortunately, they are crucial concepts in data-intensive computation, and putting them right in your face both makes you think about them, and makes your users accept that they are a thing worth thinking about too.
Series of Online Research Software Events (SORSE) - Ongoing
An ongoing call for online Research Software Engineering events, being organized jointly by a number of national RSE organizations. First review will occur on 12 July, with notifications on the 17th, and the next is 31 July. Been meaning to give a talk (or panel, or workshop) on research software engineering topics? This might be a great venue for testing out a new talk.
CZI Essential Open Source Software for Science, Cycle 3 - Applications Due 4 Aug
The latest round of the invaluable CZI funding for open source software that underpins scientific computing (especially,but not exclusively, in the life sciences). We need more programs like this.
Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing 2020 (PEARC ‘20) - 27 - 31 July, $100 USD
The schedule for the (virtual, of course) PEARC 2020 is out, with a mix of tutorials and talks about providing advanced research computing services. There’s everything here from data governance (managing persistent identifiers) to deploying the OpenHPC stack and maintaining science gateways. It’s not hard to find $100 worth of material on the schedule.
Deep Learning for Science School - 9 July to 17 Sept, Free
This virtual ”summer school” will be held on Thursdays at 9:30-11am Pacific over Zoom, with recordings on YouTube if you can’t make the sessions, and registrants will get an invite to a Slack group. The still-tentative agenda covers:
Some readers might be interested in WireViz, a tool that generates wiring diagrams from yaml files describing the items and their connections.
In praise of (the original) Hungarian Notation for software development, to help ”make wrong code look wrong”.
The case for SQLite as an application file format for anything that outputs stuff that looks like tables.
AWS has released Honeycode, it’s low/no-code tool for simple web and mobile apps. It’s clearly aimed at being, amongst other things, an Airtable-killer. Is anyone using these kinds of tools or other low/no code packages to quickly deliver applications in a research computing context?
And that’s it for another week.
Have a great weekend, and good luck in the coming week with your research computing team,
Jonathan
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