University Research Computing

ChargerNet Users:

We are planning a  URC Webserver/Portal outage for Tuesday, September 8, 2009 from 7am until 8am.   We will use this outage to upgrade the webserver to Redhat EL 5.3. read more »

ChargerNet Cluster Users:

This is a reminder that we are transitioning away from the Condor Job Scheduler to the Torque/Maui Scheduling system.  We have been running both systems for most of the summer in order to allow sufficient time for you to learn the new commands and update your submission scripts and procedures.  We have now moved most of our compute nodes into Torque/Maui and we plan to complete the transition and retire Condor on September 15th.

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There are several application changes that we will make prior to the start of the Fall 2009 Semester. In conjunction with the updates, we will be retiring old versions of the software. I’ve compiled a list of “new” application versions, as well as a list of the versions that will be retired: read more »

ChargerNet Users:

We are beginning to transition from the Condor Job Scheduler that we have used in the cluster since its inception in 2005 to the Torque/Maui Scheduling system which has become the predominate scheduler for academic HPC environments.  This change will allow us to take better advantage of tools and techniques developed at other universities, provide better integration with commercial products which support Torque/Maui for parallel processing (like MatLab), and improve our queue management by implementing resource limits or “fair share” algorithms. read more »

ChargerNet Users:

Last night at about 6pm, there was a fire in the room that provides power to the campus server room, as a result all primary campus systems including the ChargerNet cluster lost power until about 1:30am. Obviously, all running jobs were lost.

URC staff is currently working to bring the cluster back on line.  Hopefully, we will be back in production this afternoon, and I will provide additional details at that time.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

Chuck

ChargerNet Users:

ITS is planning a network outage for Saturday March 14th from 6am until 9am.  As a result you will be unable to reach the ChargerNet computing cluster during this time.  The good news is that we expect the cluster to remain operational so your running jobs should not be affected.  The one exception is jobs that use the Abaqus software package – they may fail during the outage because they will be unable to contact the license server which is provided by the College of Engineering.

So, if you are using Abaqus, you may want to plan your work so that your jobs finish prior to March 14th.  If not, then the only impact you will see is loss of access to the cluster for 3 hours on the morning of March 14th.

We are planning a cluster outage for Monday, October 13, 2008 from 10am until noon (this is the first day of fall break).   We will use this outage to perform a few minor maintenance tasks as well as to complete some upgrades to our disk storage system that will improve both manageability and scalability.   This outage will impact the entire cluster and all running jobs.  Please plan your work so that your jobs will complete prior to the start of this outage or so that they can be restarted after the cluster is back online without losing the prior work.

We apologize for any inconvenience that this may cause, but the need to perform certain routine maintenance tasks requires a complete outage once or twice per year.  We do not anticipate the need to schedule any additional outages until spring break.

Please send a response if you have any questions or comments.

On Monday, Sept 29th, from 12 noon until 1 pm LS-Dyna will be unavailable so that we can install the new license key.  This action is required every September when the software license renews.  In the past we have been able to simply wait for a time when no LS-Dyna jobs were running and then install the license without impacting users, but this year the cluster has been so busy that this has not been possible.  So we must schedule this specific time to perform the installation. read more »

If you are reading this, you may have noticed that the University Research Computing website has had a facelift!

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Attention ChargerNet Users:

In order to complete some necessary maintenance, we are scheduling a cluster outage for Tuesday, March 18th, beginning at 8am and concluding by 12 noon. read more »