Welcome to the Notre Dame Center for Research Computing (CRC). Authorized uses only. All activity may be monitored and reported. The CRC Home Page can be found at: http://crc.nd.edu !!!!!! CRC SOFTWARE IS CONTROLLED BY MODULES !!!!!! See the Modules link under the Software Link on the CRC web page The interactive/development machines: stats.hpcc.nd.edu, opteron.hpcc.nd.edu and opteronA.hpcc.nd.edu are for interactive/development use only. Jobs running longer than one hour may be killed at the administrators discretion. ***************************************************************************** Please note: The maintenance period for CRC machines is from 2:00 - 10:00 A.M. on the 2nd and 4th Sunday of each month. During this period machines (especially interactive machines) may be unavailable in order to perform hardware/software maintenance and or upgrades. ***************************************************************************** ***************************************************************************** Wed Sep 9 09:47:13 EDT 2009 ***************************************************************************** Users who are migrating to the new environment (newcell.crc.nd.edu) should first update their password at https://accounts.nd.edu/password - this will then synchronize your password on the nd.edu and crc.nd.edu AFS cells. Users are encouraged to migrate to the new environment as soon as possible. ***************************************************************************** Wed Oct 14 16:11:43 EDT 2009 ***************************************************************************** ******** Subject: CRC NEWS - OCT 2009 - Equipment Upgrades and EOL for Old Environment 1) MIGRATION TO THE "NEW" CRC ENVIRONMENT The CRC is actively moving all production systems from the old to the new software environment. This new environment features an upgrade to the Red Hat 5.4 operating system, SGE 6.2 job queuing system, and the crc.nd.edu AFS cell for home directories with a 100GB default quota. The new environment was initially made available a year ago to selected beta users and more recently general CRC users - with your help we have made many changes and updates to numerous applications. The "old" environment at this time generally consists of the single CPU dual core Sun x2100 (dcopt) nodes. These machines will be replaced in November (see below). *** Following the Nov equipment upgrade, less than 10 compute nodes will be left in the old environment for legacy applications *** 2) 2009-2010 EQUIPMENT UPGRADES The CRC is undertaking a multi part equipment upgrade during the 2009-2010 school year. These upgrades were discussed at multiple open CRC user information sessions this past summer and are summarized here: - High Throughput Computing Upgrade: replace 360 x2100 servers Fall 2009 - High Performance Computing Upgrade: multiple partner clusters Fall 2009/Spring 2009 - Core Network Upgrades: upgrades to core routers and 10GigE evals Fall 2009 - SMP Machine Acquisition: Spring 2010 - High Performance Parallel File System: Spring 2010/Summer 2010 Over the past couple of months CRC staff have been evaluating, testing, and pricing systems from Sun, HP, IBM, Dell, SGI and Penguin Computing to serve in a High Throughput Computing capacity. The systems will replace the 4 year old Sun X2100 opteron nodes. After extensive evaluations it was decided to replace the Sun X2100s with Hewlett Packard (HP) Model DL165 G6 nodes - Each node contains dual AMD Model 2431 Istanbul (6 core) Opteron processors providing a total of 12 cores per node. These HP systems will offer 1GB of RAM per core for a total of 12 GB, and a 160 GB SATA disk. which will offer roughly 100 GB of local scratch space. The total core count for the dcopt upgrade will go from 720 to 4,320 nodes, with 4.3 TB of RAM. In addition these systems offer some of the best power efficiencies available (watt/core) and will help lower cost of ownership in the upcoming years. The CRC has aggressively negotiated bulk pricing on these servers. Faculty interested in purchasing (identical machines) in line with our purchase order should contact the CRC. 3) HP SERVER INSTALLATION & FINAL MOVE TOWARD THE NEW ENVIRONMENT The CRC "old" environment at this time generally consists of the Sun x2100 (dcopt) nodes.These nodes will be replaced with the new HP servers and configured for the new software environment. It is expected that the installation of HP nodes will begin in mid November and be completed prior to Thanksgiving. As part of the upgrade it is likely that one full scale outage will be planned. Users will be notified of the exact time and dates as they become available. A few machines (~10) will remain in the "old" environment for those using legacy applications that will not be ported to the new environment. The remaining machines in the old environment will only be patched for security purposes and all user support for this environment will End of Life with the end of this calendar year. Please contact us with any questions at crcsupport@nd.edu. The CRC Staff ***************************************************************************** Last Update: Wed Oct 14 16:11:43 EDT 2009 ***************************************************************************** For questions/problems regarding the CRC send email to CRCsupport@nd.edu For critical problems "after-hours" please contact OIT Operations at 631-5603 *****************************************************************************