| What | When | Summary |
|---|---|---|
| Blueice Down Fri 5/09 | 05/09/08 | See Details Below |
| Bluefire Transition | 04/25/08 | See Details Below |
| New Data Analysis Nodes | 04/24/08 | See Details Below |
| /fis Now GPFS Mounted | 04/17/08 | See Details Below |
| Mass Store Downtime | Every Sunday 0000-0200 | Weekly Backup |
| Bluevista Maintenance | 05/05/08 0600-1300 | Monthly |
| Blueice Maintenance | 05/12/08 0600-1300 | Monthly |
| Lightning/Pegasus Maint | 05/19/08 0600-1800 | Monthly |
Blueice will be down on Friday, 05/09 from 08:00 - 16:00 MT. The reason for the down time is to attach bluefire (POWER 6) to the current blueice storage subsystem. This also means that the divisional filesystems and the /fis filesystem will not be available on bluevista or the data analysis and visualization cluster.
Blueice, NCAR's IBM POWER5+, will be decommissioned during June 2008 as part of NCAR's plan to increase its computational capacity. The earliest blueice will be decommissioned is 08:00 Mountain Time on June 11. The decommissioning could be delayed, depending on how quickly the installation and commissioning of NCAR's newest supercomputer, an IBM POWER6 called bluefire, proceeds. Due to electrical power limitations in the NCAR computing facility, blueice and the entire bluefire cluster cannot be powered-up at the same time. Please note that part of bluefire will be available to the user community for 7-10 days before blueice is decommissioned.
Bluevista, NCAR's IBM POWER5, will continue to be available to users through this transition. Bluevista will be decommissioned on September 28, 2008. Since bluevista is a smaller computer, we encourage users to make the switch to bluefire as soon as possible. We anticipate bluevista queues (even premium) will get long in June and July, since some projects will need more time to move their code to bluefire.
Please plan ahead for this transition. CISL encourages users to complete any time-critical work well ahead of deadlines, so delays due to long queues or moving your code to a new computer will not mean missed deadlines.
Two new nodes, hail.scd.ucar.edu and gust.scd.ucar.edu, have been added to the data analysis cluster and are available for usage. These nodes have access to all the same file systems as gale.scd.ucar.edu and breeze.scd.ucar.edu. We are waiting on some additional switch hardware, so /ptmp access will be a little slower but once this hardware has been installed, high performance access will be available.
The move of the /fis filesystem has been completed, and the files are now being mounted from blueice (as preparation for the arrival of the Power 6 later this spring). Files from /fis are also available on the CISL data analysis and visualization clusters.
Because /fis is now GPFS-mounted on the supers, it is possible that files will not be available if there is a failure of blueice's GPFS. Additionally, /fis is NFS-mounted from blueice on the data analysis and viz clusters, so it also can be affected by blueice GPFS failures.
Such failures do occur occasionally, and CISL is working with IBM to improve GPFS dependability. We also expect this situation to improve when bluefire arrives.
Tempest was taken out of production at noon on April 23. Tempest's user home directories will be retained for six months.i Users will need to request their home directory within those six months, and specify the CISL machine where they want the tarball placed (breeze, gale etc). /ptmp files are "NOT" backed up and are not available for restore.
Data Analysis and Visualization work may be done on CISL's data analysis and visualization clusters. Detailed information on these clusters is available from the Getting Started section on the main page of the DASG web site. If you have further questions, please submit a Trouble Ticket and we'll be happy to answer what we can.
http://www.cisl.ucar.edu/hss/dasg/
A copy of the April 2 presentation on the Integrated Computing Environment for Scientific Simulation (ICESS) is now available at:
http://www.cisl.ucar.edu/tcg/icess/ICESS_Phase_II_Apr_2_Presentation.pdf
The presentation includes an update on the current status of the bluefire installation, information on applying for the Accelerated Scientific Discovery (ASD) campaign, as well as security and filesystem plans for bluefire.
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For additional CISL documentation, see:
http://www.cisl.ucar.edu/docs/catalog