The ExCALIBUR ExAMPLER project has spent 29 February and 1 March at The James Hutton Institute training social scientists, in particular agent-based modellers (ABM), how to access and run their models on HPC clusters. This activity is part of the broader ExAMPLER remit of engaging the ABM community to understand the barriers that need to be overcome for developing exascale capacity within the social science community.
There were 17 attendees from six countries learning how to prepare their models to run on HPC, write shell scripts, use secure shell to log in to remote machines, submit jobs using SLURM, and use encryption to protect data. Diana Suleimenova from Brunel University gave two guest lectures, including hands-on access to ARCHER-2. The course was a huge success, with our ‘toy’ cluster Beauregarde even doubling as a disco ball!