The RSE group of SCRTP provides software support both for Warwick and regional users of the Sulis Tier-2 system. Below is a non-exhaustive list of services that we provide in connection with this system. If you have another software support or development related request connected to your use of Sulis, please contact us at rse@warwick.ac.uk and we will see if we can help you

• Assist with requesting additions to centrally-installed software. If you want additional centrally managed software but are not sure that it can easily be installed please ask us and we can see what can be done
• Assist with building self managed software for the hardware on Sulis. The dual 64 core AMD Rome CPUs in Sulis often require different choices when compiling software - we can provide help with selecting the best approach available in a given package
• Assist with creating workflows and submission scripts. Sulis is primarily aimed at ensemble computing but there are many approaches to using the system to this end. We can help you work out which of the available frameworks will work best for your problem and can help you write scripts to use them efficiently
• Assist with I/O. Input/Output is often a limiting factor in ensemble computing but there are approaches that help. Using Database I/O, caching output before writing and making using of suitable output libraries are all options that we can help you choose between and help you to implement in your code
• Help parallelise existing workflows. Some workflows are intrinsically serial - job B depends on the results of job A but in many cases there are opportunities for exploiting parallelism by simply splitting up the tasks in the correct way. We can help with this
• System tuning. While the primary purpose of Sulis is to run ensemble calculations this does not mean that you will not be running conventionally parallel codes using threads or MPI. In both of these cases we can help tune your code to achieve maximum performance on the Sulis hardware
• Debugging and profiling support. Most users of tier-2 systems will be using software that is well tested and portable but sometimes errors or performance problems only crop up on specific platforms. We can help with debugging and profiling your code to see what the problem is and how it might be fixed.

Unfortunately we are not able to offer any support to write or rewrite substantial amounts of code as part of our support of the Sulis service. If you need support at this level and are able and willing to apply for a grant to support the work then please fill out this form and we work with you to write the grant application for RSE time for your problem.