Thank you. So, I'm going to show you the new website that we've made with the computing resources and
I do realize that today we were supposed to have everything in English, but unfortunately, it's only
the Norwegian version of the website that is finished, so I'll show that and then just promise you
that the English ones are soon to be ready as well.
We basically realized that the old websites that we had for the computing resources were a little
challenging to use, so we've tried to improve them a bit. One thing that we got feedback on was
that we need to help people choose the right computing resource for their needs. Because there are quite a few different ones
to choose from. One thing is that the website now lists a variety of services and categorizes
them according to your computation needs just to help you get a get started initially but then in
addition we also have for those who are unsure about their needs. We also have some helpful questions with descriptions
to help you choose the right service. So, the variety of questions, things that you should think about
and consider before you decide on what to do, what to use and then the one thing that we hope will
help the most is that we have filtering abilities to choose services. Depending on the
compute power you need, the amount of data you might have that you
need to analyse, whether you need something that is very user friendly or not, or if you are very
dedicated. Like if you need dedicated resources for working with machine learning. So we have a list
of the different computing resources here, all of them, also marked with what type of data you are
allowed to put or use it for, but then also you could say that well you know I'm going to have
I need to run some medium to heavy computing
I have... I don't have that much data. Okey so the list is now a little shorter, I have a slightly
slimmer selection of services that I can choose from. Maybe also not medium, but heavy computing
the list drops a little more, and then once you get this list you can also check out
the individual services. Say I have yellow data I want to check out
Fox that Jon also talked about earlier. I get to the website that describes Fox in detail and
it tells me all the additional information that I need. For instance, that I need to have an Educloud user to get access
It has helpful guides and everything to get me get me started. The whole purpose of this website
is basically to try and help it help you as users to figure out which service you should choose, and if at
the end of going through this and you're still stumped, and you don't know what to do
Let's see if we get all the way back, you can also reach us if you need help and, or if you have
very particular needs we also have additional services to help you set up the specific service that
might cover your very specific challenges.
So, if anyone sees this and figures "oh but there is some other stuff that I wish you'd also included
in these websites", then please let us know. We are open for adjustments and improvements, always.
With that I think I'll just say thank you for listening.
Thank you very much Anne. Do you know anything about other, many more uses these days?
For computing resources, you mean? Well, I think that more and more the mains are in need of
computing resources, compared to years ago, because data is just so much more available these days
which also means that there are more and more people who need the training that Sabry talked about
before the break as well. In terms of how many users we have, I think Jon might have more accurate
numbers, since he's sort of in charge of all most of these resources. I can ask Jon afterwards.
as well. But do we have any science behind how you have structured
the documentation, do we know that this will help. Yes, so when we started this a while ago we involved
a couple of users who are data managers from various fields, and asked them what
sort of questions the people they helped bring up, to try and
make this website more helpful to cover the needs of the users. We did get quite a bit of user
feedback there in the beginning and then we also involved the library,
a couple of times, just to get feedback from them as well because they also get different
questions than we do.
I think maybe we should have Jon here as well to ask, because I have some more questions, 00:06: 23.900 --> 00:06:31.150 I think we can do some more questions. Jon can you say anything about
how many users we have now compared to last year, or the year before.
I think we have around 100-ish, it's about the same as a couple of years ago so the thing
was when we had Abel, the old HPC system, we had 300 users
but then we turn that down, turn it off and then we have the year gap before we had Fox in place
So that means that the number of users fell quite dramatically because all of them went into the
national HPC systems.
but now it's building up again for the local users
there are some questions here about Educloud as well, so the question is how can we use
Jupyter notebook and RStudio on Educloud. Is it ready?
No I don't think those are ready yet, but I see this as a request and it will come very soon.
But it will be ready? Yes
There is another question, how do you know which resources to choose if you need both computing and storage?
I mean when you need both you can tick both in the filtering option and they should,
that should give you at least a much shorter list compared to the complete list of computing
resources. So that should help, sometimes you may unfortunately end up in the situation where
when you tick all the boxes that cover your needs that you don't end up with anything
because some needs are just really hard to meet, but in those cases I would recommend that you reach
out to us and we'll see if we can't figure something out anyways. As a general rule
if you know where the data is, you will need the computer close to the data because data
is hard to move, but it's easy to move around between computer resources
There are more questions here about resources and how they can determine
what kind of resources they actually need, because they have to order CPU time
or RAM and disk. Is there any way they can simulate how much they need or should they just choose
the small one and see if it's enough and then ask for more afterwards?
that's generally a good rule. The standard rule for ages has been that researchers ask for
the worst-case scenario. It turns out that they use a very small part of that, that is at least nationally true
I think it's better to say to start small and scale out if it's not enough
you will realize that quite quickly and you can get more resources