isambard

Guide for using containers on Isambard AI (BriCS) supercomputers with Podman-HPC and Apptainer (formerly Singularity). Use this skill whenever a user asks about running containers on Isambard, using podman-hpc or apptainer/singularity, pulling or building container images, running containers on compute nodes or across multiple nodes with MPI or NCCL, GPU access inside containers, squashfs image migration, the brics/nccl or brics/apptainer-multi-node modules, using NGC (Nvidia GPU Cloud) containers on Isambard, or getting full Slingshot 11 interconnect bandwidth from containerised workloads. Also trigger for questions about aarch64-compatible container images, --fakeroot builds, the /host/adapt.sh entrypoint, or any container-related workflow on an HPE Cray system.

Guide for using GPUs and CUDA on Isambard AI (BriCS) supercomputers (Isambard-AI Phase 1 and Phase 2, which have NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper GPUs). Use this skill whenever a user asks about CUDA on Isambard, loading the cudatoolkit or nvhpc modules, compiling CUDA kernels with nvcc, the correct -arch flag for the GH200 (sm_90), CUDA forward compatibility, using a newer CUDA version than the installed driver supports, the NVIDIA HPC SDK on Isambard, NGC container images for GPU workloads, nvidia-smi on compute nodes, or diagnosing CUDA version mismatches. Also trigger for general GPU programming setup questions on Isambard, even if the user doesn't say "CUDA" explicitly. Note: GPUs are only on Isambard-AI (Phase 1 and Phase 2) — not Isambard 3.

Guidance for writing, reviewing, and running AI-generated code responsibly on Bristol Centre for Supercomputing (BriCS) shared HPC resources: Isambard-AI and Isambard 3. Use this skill whenever generating, adapting, or debugging code intended to run on BriCS facilities, writing Slurm job scripts, managing storage, installing software, or ensuring compliance with BriCS policies.

Guide for using the modules system, programming environments, compilers, and profiling tools on Isambard AI (BriCS) supercomputers (Isambard-AI and Isambard 3). Use this skill whenever a user asks about loading modules on Isambard, the Cray Programming Environment (PrgEnv-gnu, PrgEnv-cray), compiler wrappers (cc, CC, ftn), GCC or NVIDIA compilers, compiler flags for Arm/Grace (neoverse-v2), BriCS-supplied modules (brics/nccl, brics/tmux, etc.), profiling with gprof, Cray perftools, or Nvidia Nsight Systems. Also trigger for questions about linking MPI or scientific libraries on Isambard, or troubleshooting compiler and build issues on the Cray HPE system — even if the user doesn't explicitly say "modules".

Guide for using MPI on Isambard AI (BriCS) supercomputers (Isambard-AI and Isambard 3). Use this skill whenever a user asks about MPI on Isambard, running multi-node MPI jobs, Cray MPICH, cray-mpich, PrgEnv-gnu or PrgEnv-cray for MPI, the PMI or PMIx process manager interface, srun --mpi flags (cray_shasta, pmi2, pmix), installing OpenMPI or MPICH with conda or from source, mpi4py on Isambard, libfabric and Slingshot 11 MPI performance, or why mpirun and mpiexec should not be used on Isambard. Also trigger for questions about linking MPI libraries, compiler wrappers with MPI (mpicc, mpicxx, mpif90), or any multi-node communication setup on an HPE Cray system.