The second Isambard hackathon “Stoking The Fire” ended yesterday after a day and a half of hacking on the second half of the top 10 most common Archer codes + UM/NEMO. There were specialists for each code in attendance, Cray compiler developers and Cavium engineers.

I was really pleased to see the system handling the workload without incident and surprised that this time not a single node crashed! That alone makes the week it took to upgrade the ARM chips worth it!

There were bugs in some codes being run, there were even a couple of compiler and performance tool bugs discovered and raised with Cray; At this early stage every bug found is a step towards getting the platform closer to operational quality!

I spent my time helping users, applying hotfixes, investigating enhancement requests and eating the sandwiches.

The following codes were run successfully:

• CASTEP
• OpenFOAM
• SBLI
• UM
• NEMO
• Molpro
• NAMD
• Hydro3D
• Bookleaf