HPC News & Changes

This page is intended to act as a timeline of events for the Comet HPC project, as well as major changes in functionality or policies relating to the system.

Starting March 2026, we also publish a monthly summary newsletter to the HPC-Users email distribution list (to which all users of Comet are subscribed):

• Newsletters

The Research Computing Community is aimed at researchers who write and adapt code, use data intensive methods or HPC. Everyone is very welcome to join in our next community meeting on Thursday 24th September. Usually bi-monthly on a Monday afternoon, this meeting has been moved to Thursday in order welcome new research students to our community at the start of term.

Add to Calendar from this page. Whether you can attend the next meeting or not, please do join our Teams Channel and answer our one-question form so we have an idea of numbers. Thanks

Users of Bede supercomputer (at Durham University) should have received several warnings via email because our tenure with Bede is ending. If you or any colleagues have used Bede in the past, please check that any data you care about is in a safe place, like RDW.

Contact hpc.researchcomputing@newcastle.ac.uk if you have any questions⁠

The license for the University Stata / Stata-MP installation on Comet has now been updated for the 2026-2027 year.

The Building a Parallel Task Array Solution and Build A Parallel MPI Solution guides are now live. These have been developed based on feedback from attendees to the HPC Introduction workshops which the RSE team offers to Newcastle University staff and students, and represents a stepping stone from the initial simple, serial examples introduced in the basic HPC concepts.

This builds on concepts introduced in the Advanced Slurm Job Types page, which asks you to think about the type of input data you may need to work on. Different data will require different approaches, and this normally falls in to either the Task Array or Parallel MPI category.

Also included in the Building a Parallel Task Array Solution guide is an example of how you can still process very large input data sets, even if you are limited in the number of concurrent array tasks at any time (such as present on Comet in the MaxSubmitJobs and GrpSubmitJobs limits)

Zonation 5

Zonation 5 is a spatial prioritization software that can be used to identify priority areas to support conservation planning, land use planning, ecological impact avoidance and other similar tasks. The software uses spatial raster data on the distributions of individual biodiversity features (species, habitats, ecosystem services etc.) to identify which locations in a landscape are most important for retaining biodiversity. Zonation can account for local habitat quality and ecological connectivity together with costs, threats and different land tenure, thus providing a quantitative method for spatial planning that enhances the persistence of biodiversity in the long term.

The software is available in a Linux AppImage format and we have written a simple guide for Comet users which covers the 3 steps to download, unzip and run the software from the Open OnDemand Linux X11 VNC desktop session offered by Comet.

For more information: Zonation 5 guide for Comet

XBeach

This software has been installed on Comet and a guide can be found on the XBeach wiki page.

LISFLOOD-FP

This software has been installed on Comet and a guide can be found on the LISFLOOD-FP wiki page.

Building R / RStudio Containers

Using R / RStudio with complex additional R libraries can be difficult, and it is impractical to install every combination of library that all of our users want, along with all of their dependencies in turn.

We've written a short guide which explains how you can use Apptainer containers to build your own custom R / RStudio environment, complete with any bespoke libraries and all the necessary runtime dependencies without resorting to any admin requests. You can also run this RStudio install from our Open OnDemand Linux X11 desktop, so you still get access to the full desktop application.

For some of our users with more complex R / RStudio software requirements, this may offer a better solution than trying to get lots of new libraries working alongside existing R modules which are installed on the HPC.

You can find the short guide which illustrates a proof of concept R/RStudio container environment in the wiki.

• 2026 - May / June
• 2026 - April
• 2026 - March
• 2026 - February
• 2026 - January
• 2025

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