This Month's GOTCHA

Machines: Now You See 'Em, Now You Don't

The summer and fall of '95 have seen a number of major changes in the NCAR/SCD Machine Room. Often the only way to keep up is to read the Daily Bulletin faithfully to see what's happening that day. You can subscribe to have the Daily Bulletin automatically mailed to you each day.

Summary of Machine Changes

CRAY EL Cluster upgraded: Basically, there is no longer a CRAY EL Cluster. The CRAY EL 98 computers alpine and monarch were decommissioned on Monday, September 11. They have been replaced by a CRAY J908 computer named paiute, which is an 8-processor 256 Mw J90 (running UNICOS 8.0.4). This represents a substantial increase in compute power. SCD automatically moved users' home directories from alpine over to paiute, which became operational September 25.
Note: Paiute was upgraded to 16 processors on November 20.

IBM SP-1 removed from service: With the additional compute power offered by the arrival of the CRAY J908 computer, and after careful analysis of SP-1 support/maintenance costs and usage statistics, SCD decided to remove the IBM SP-1 from service effective September 30.

Film Room changes too: SCD discontinued black-and-white 35-mm slide processing on September 30. However, black-and-white microfiche processing will continue, provided the Dicomed equipment (which is quite old) holds out.

Mass Storage System upgrade coming: Users should see much quicker response when the overloaded IBM 3090 is upgraded to an IBM 9672-R21 approximately November 1.

Software Changes

UNICOS 8.0.4 on all Crays: All Cray platforms have been upgraded to UNICOS 8.0.4. This means users who compiled under older versions of the OS are advised to recompile their codes before rerunning them.

NCAR Graphics Version 4.0 has been released and is running on all the Cray platforms. The new prototype GUI, however, is provided only on the SCD front-end computer, meeker, and the SCD Sun systems. On the Cray systems, be sure you have an "NCARG_ROOT" variable set:

If you are linking in the graphics libraries via segldr, you should specify the following:

Maintained by: consult1@ncar.ucar.edu
Comments & suggestions welcomed.