MPI workshop at CHPC

Posted: May 21, 2013

Duration: June 17 9am-3pm, June 18 9am-3pm

CHPC will be a satellite site for Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center two day workshop focusing on MPI programming. This is an excellent opportunity to expand on MPI programming skills beyond the short presentations that we teach.

For more details and schedule of the workshop, visit http://www.psc.edu/index.php/training/mpi-programming. The location of the MPI workshop at the University of Utah will be at the INSCC Auditorium, INSCC 110. Local staff will be on site to address local and we will also be able to ask questions to the speakers via the webcast.

We encourage everyone, not just University of Utah affiliates, to attend this workshop. If you have any local questions, please, send them to issues@chpc.utah.edu.

The registration is available through the XSEDE site, portal.xsede.org/course-calendar/-/training-user/class/124. If you don't have an XSEDE portal account, you can create it for free. The MPI workshop is also free and open to the public.

UPDATE on Major Campus Power Outage TONIGHT

Posted: May 15, 2013

Duration: Wednesday, May 15, 2013 at 11:59 pm to Thursday, May 16, 2013 at 6:30 am

As announced last week, there is a Campus planned power outage that will occur overnight that will affect the INSCC and SSB buildings.

JOB SCHEDULERS WILL BE PAUSED: Initially we announced that the clusters would not be impacted, but when reconsidering the potential impact of the equipment affected by the outage the decision was made to pause the schedulers on ALL clusters right before the outage starts. This means that no new jobs will be started during the outage, but that jobs already running will continue. The schedulers will be resumed once we receive notification that the power has been restored.

REMINDER: CHPC recommends that ALL tenants of INSCC and any other buildings impacted by this outage shut-down their desktop prior to leaving for the day on Wednesday May 15th.

Summer school courses at the CHPC

Posted: May 14, 2013

Similarly to previous few years, CHPC will be hosting two courses from the Virtual School of Computational Science and Engineering, in early and late July. We encourage everyone interested in the topics covered to register and attend these courses. They provide a unique opportunity to attend classes taught by nationwide leaders in the field.

For more details, see the Summer School local webpage at http://www.chpc.utah.edu/docs/news/news_items/vscse-2013.php

Feel free to forward this information to anyone who may be interested. The Summer School is open to everyone, not just University of Utah affiliates.

Matlab upgrade

Posted: May 14, 2013

We have upgraded Matlab on our Linux clusters and administered desktops to version R2013a. The major change you will notice from the previously default version R2012a is a change in the GUI interface. There are additional new features that are listed at http://www.mathworks.com/help/relnotes/new-features.html.

If you encounter any problems, please, let us know at issues@chpc.utah.edu.

Major Campus Power Interruption, Little Impact on CHPC Services (Wed 5/15 11:59 pm until Thur 5/16 6:30 am)

Posted: May 10, 2013

Wednesday, May 15, 2013 at 11:59 pm to Thursday, May 16, 2013 at 6:30 am

The Campus has planned a power outage of several buildings and has announced this outage is necessary to prevent further damage to equipment or a safety hazard to building occupants. Most CHPC services will not be impacted, however power will be out in the INSCC and SSB buildings. This power outage will affect CHPC services as detailed below:

INSCC Building data center (and building):

• No air conditioning in the INSCC data center room and the UPS will not sustain load for the entire outage. Any equipment housed in INSCC data center must be shut down before 11:59 p.m. on Wednesday May 15th.
• ALL tenants of the INSCC building should shut down their desktop prior to leaving for the day on Wednesday May 15th.

SSB Building data center:

• The data center part of SSB is expected to ride through this outage on UPS/generator.

Other buildings affected:

• CHPC recommends that ALL tenants of impacted buildings shut-down their desktop prior to leaving for the day on Wednesday May 15th.

CHPC Summer Downtimes and Data Center Move Schedule

Posted: May 9, 2013

Many of you have heard about the modern, off-campus data center that the University has developed in downtown Salt Lake City. Over the past year, CHPC has been planning its move to the new facility, which will bring our community many benefits, including more stable electric power and significantly more expansion capacity for rack space and power. Nevertheless, the move will require some significant disruptions to CHPC services at times over the summer. We ask for your patience and flexibility as we go through this process. By remaining flexible, we believe we can minimize the duration of the downtimes. We will provide frequent updates through email and also our new Twitter feed (@CHPCUpdates).

Here is the anticipated general timeline of the significant steps and milestones in the DDC move process:

May 2013:

• Configure and test new switch in DDC
• Receive new "Kingspeak" cluster (see below for a description) hardware and begin provisioning (with the upgraded Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 operating system – RH6) in DDC
• Receive and install new CI-WATER storage in DDC
• Receive and install new Sloan Sky Survey storage in DDC
• Prepare for June equipment moves
• May 31: Allocation proposals are due for Ember and Updraft (Updraft only will be allocated through 12/31/2013)

June 2013:

• Continue receiving and provisioning Kingspeak; begin staff testing, software builds on RH6 (including new batch system software), and early user access
• June 4th: Regular CHPC Major downtime: Ember, Updraft, and Sanddunearch down for Komas machine room maintenance as usual
  • Move Atmospheric Sciences cluster (atmos, meteo and wx, and nodes, except gl nodes) - expect an extended downtime for these servers of approximately 2 days beginning June 4th
  • Move kachina.chpc.utah.edu and swasey.chpc.utah.edu - Expect extended downtime of 2 days
  • Move phase I of VM Farm - No downtime expected
  • Move of Apexarch cluster and homerfs – Expect extended downtime of 2 days
  • UCS Nodes and attached storage – Expect extended downtimes of 2 days

July 2013:

• Batch system up - Kingspeak cluster will run in freecycle mode through October 1

August 2013:

• All users will be given access to the Kingspeak cluster in freecycle mode.
• Move Ember cluster - current downtime estimate is 3 +/- 1 weeks. This window will be more tightly specified based on move experience over the summer and more detailed work scheduling as this window approaches.
• August 31, 2013: Allocation requests are due for Kingspeak and Ember. No further allocations will be awarded on Updraft. September 2013:
• September: Ember will be brought up under RH6 and under the new batch system and will run in freecycle through October 1.

Please note that we will not be moving the Sanddunearch and Updraft clusters to the DDC, but instead will run them in place until December 31, 2013 or thereabouts. These nearly end-of-life clusters will be retired as the remodeling of the former Komas data center is scheduled to begin at that time. Also slated for retirement are /scratch/serial, /scratch/uintah, and /scratch/general file systems. These /scratch systems will not be mounted on Kingspeak or on Ember after it has been moved to the DDC.

Please relay any concerns about this planned work, particularly in regard to deadlines for conferences and grant proposals and other impacts.

Kingspeak cluster details (general nodes):

• 32 nodes (16 cores each) - 512 cores total
• 2 interactive nodes
• 2.6Ghz speed with AVX support: 10.6 TFlops max, (without AVX: 5.3 TFlops)
  • Note that not all codes will be able to take advantage of the AVX support as this feature is dependent upon how well the codes vectorize.
  • Also note that the general nodes on Ember run at a max speed of 9 TFlops
• Infiniband interconnect
• New /scratch space of approximately 150 TBytes

CHPC now on Twitter!

Posted: May 8, 2013

In anticipation of the impact of the move to the downtown datacenter (more on this will follow in the coming days) CHPC is adding Twitter as a mechanism to disseminate information to our users. We have established two feeds: @CHPCOutages for information on both planned and unexpected outages and @CHPCUpdates for all News items.

• https://twitter.com/CHPCOutages
• https://twitter.com/CHPCUpdates

No Twitter account is needed and all information distributed in this manner will be redundant to information available on the CHPC website. You may bookmark the above webpages, follow the feeds if you are a Twitter user, or both. There will also be a link to these feeds on the CHPC main webpage.

The @CHPCOutages feed will be used to announce downtimes, both planned and emergency outages and hardware failures, and to provide updates. We will strive to post updates of the progress of planned downtimes to better provide users with the current status. For emergency outages and hardware failures we will strive to send out updates much more frequently – even if it is to let users know that there is no change in status. This feed will also be used to update users on the status of the move to the new Downtown Datacenter – a process that will occur over the next several months and that will require several disruptions in service. An announcement with our tentative timetable will be sent to users in the next few days.

The @CHPCUpdates feed will be used to distribute News and other Information about CHPC. This will include items such as CHPC presentations, short courses, new resources, and publications resulting from use of CHPC resources.

NOTE: Please do not use Twitter as a mechanism to report problems or ask questions. While we will monitor our feeds closely, we will use our jira system to track questions, and other issues needing our attention. We ask you please continue to send such concerns as usual to issues@chpc.utah.edu, or post directly on jira.chpc.utah.edu.

/scratch/ibrix back on-line and available for use

Posted: May 7, 2013

The maintenance on the /scratch/ibrix system is now complete. Users are now welcome to once again make use of both the /scratch/ibrix/chpc_gen and the /scratch/ibrix/icse file systems.

If you have issues with a batch job accessing this space, please send us an issue report which included the job number. If you have issues accessing this file system from the interactive nodes or another location, please send us an issue report giving both the machine name and the time the problem with access occurred.

UPDATE on /scratch/ibrix

Posted: May 6, 2013

The work on the /scratch/ibrix file system is progressing.

While users may notice that the /scratch/ibrix/chpc_gen is mounted, the file system is NOT ready for use. Please do not access this space until you receive a notification that it is ready for use - this most likely will not occur today.

Work is also continuing on the /scratch/ibrix/icse file system.