NCSA Bytes and Pieces

The Microsoft Teams Campus Update is being rolled out to replace Skype for Business. Zoom will continue to be licensed and available for the foreseeable future. The Microsoft Teams Transition Project is a multi-year, cross–campus effort to transition our university from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams as the primary phone communication tool. This is in response to Microsoft’s 2021 announcement that it will no longer support Skype for Business. The change will go into full effect by May 2023. NCSA Business IT is following the campus timeline for the transition from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams. Campus has provided prerecorded training resources available on the Microsoft Teams Transition Project page. Desktop Support will also host informational trainings for a brief overview of Teams' features, including getting started, chats, calls, teams, meetings and file sharing. Dates and times for these trainings will be announced soon, stay tuned! If you do not have Teams installed on your device, please contact Desktop Support for assistance with installation. Finally, starting in February of 2023, if you have an existing Polycom desk phone (traditional handset) it will no longer work. Please continue to use your headset or puck devices to place calls and participate in meetings as you currently are. If you require a desktop phone (traditional handset), please speak with your manager to request a CFOPA to include with your request to Desktop Support. Thank you for your attention and please send any questions to help@ncsa.illinois.edu.

Learn more about Parsl, the parallelization system written in Python allowing users to easily parallelize workflows and manage resources from any compute resource. This hands-on session is aimed to show how to use Parsl. Some knowledge of Python (writing and calling functions) is necessary. A JupyterHub instance with compute allocations is being set up for attendees to use. Advanced registration – by Friday, Feb. 3 – is required; bagels and coffee will be available starting at 9 a.m. Explore more information on the event, including agend and details. Wednesday, Feb. 15 | 9:30–11:30 a.m. | NCSA 1030 – Zoom Link 

The 15th annual JLESC Workshop gathers leading researchers in high–performance computing from the JLESC partners INRIA to explore the most recent and critical issues in advancing the field of HPC from petascale to the extreme scale era.The workshop is open to all participants from the JLESC institutions Illinois, INRIA, ANL, BSC, JSC, Riken R-CCS and UTK; faculties, researchers, engineers and students who want to learn more about Post–Petascale/Exascale Computing. NCSA will fund travel and registration for up to 15 participants. Explore the complete details, including agenda topics here. Deadline extended to Friday, February 3. Contact Bill Kramer or Kjellerun Olson​ if interested. Register here.  Support for attending is contingent on proposing a short talk or break session.