Blackforest, dave, and babyblue to be decommissioned

Blackforest and dave, IBM SP system

As systems age, economics and Moore's Law eat away at their usefulness relative to newer systems. While we realize that decommissionings represent a serious inconvenience to many users, they are necessary for SCD to continue to provide world class computational resources to the NCAR research community. Newer systems are able to pack significantly more capacity and capability onto the SCD computer room floor under the constraints of available space, power, cooling, and annual maintenance costs. To make room for newer systems in the SCD machine room, the older systems must go. Thus, after more than five years of service to the NCAR community, the IBM POWER3 systems blackforest, dave, and babyblue will be decommissioned on 10 January 2005.

Users may archive or transfer their data before 07:00 on 10 January 2005 when system administration staff will stop all user processes and take the machines into maintenance mode. They will then begin archiving the contents of blackforest's and babyblue's home directories. After the decommission, users will need to submit a request to SCD Consulting Services to obtain their archived home directories.

SCD strongly recommends that users make their own backups of critical files so they are not inconvenienced by delays prior to the completion of the system backups or afterward.

Note that the /ptmp directory on both blackforest and babyblue will not be archived. If you have critical files in /ptmp, you are responsible for archiving them to the MSS or moving them to another machine. (Divisional filesystems are served from bluesky and will not be affected.)

Computational work currently on these POWER3 systems can most easily be moved to the bluesky complex with only minor changes to the batch job scripts. Here are some relevant facts about bluesky:

• Bluesky's processors are roughly twice as fast as blackforest's
• Bluesky's nodes have 8 or 32 processors versus 4 or 16 on blackforest
• Bluesky's queue names are slightly different
• Comprehensive user information for bluesky is provided at:
  http://www.scd.ucar.edu/computers/bluesky/
  and
  http://www.scd.ucar.edu/docs/ibm/

Data analysis work currently on dave will need to be migrated to tempest, the system that replaced dataproc. Tempest is an SGI Origin 3800 running the IRIX operating system. Users familiar with dataproc will find tempest familiar, but dave batch job scripts will need to be rewritten for tempest since tempest uses NQE for its batch system, not LoadLeveler. User information for tempest is provided at:
http://www.scd.ucar.edu/computers/tempest/

As always, SCD Consulting Services is available to help you migrate your work from these IBM POWER3 systems to another platform. Contact a consultant at consult1@ucar.edu or 303-497-1278 if you need assistance.