Research Computing and Data

Recap from the Spring 2025 RCD Town Hall

Posted on by Ben Godfrey

The RCD team hosted a Town Hall event this afternoon to share important updates with the Clemson research computing community.

Title slide from the Town Hall, showing the RCD logo and the date of the event.

Here is the agenda from today’s event:

  • People
    • Changes in RCD Personnel
  • ReDCAT Updates
  • Palmetto
    • Spring 2025 Maintenance Window
    • Rollout of New Job Defense Shield Tool
    • Help for Grant Preparation
    • ColdFront Updates
    • New Compute Nodes Added to Palmetto 2
    • Updates to Condo Node Purchases
  • Regulated Research
    • “Granite” Environment for CUI, PHI, and NIST 800-171 (NIH) Research
  • Open Discussion and Q&A

If you missed the event, please check out the resources below to learn more:

View Recording
View Slides

Note: These resources will be available until August 31, 2025 and require logging in with your Clemson University account to view.

Posted in Announcements

Upcoming Spring 2025 Maintenance Work

Posted on by Ben Godfrey

The RCD team has scheduled a maintenance window to perform work on the Palmetto Cluster, Indigo Data Lake, and other systems at the end of the Spring semester.

This work will begin on Saturday, May 31st, 2025, at 9:00 AM. While maintenance work is in progress, all RCD services will be unavailable.

During the maintenance window, we plan to complete the following:

  • Minor OS Upgrades
  • Networking Maintenance
  • System Testing and Benchmarking

There are no plans to purge scratch space during this maintenance, but users should be mindful that scratch space is never backed up and critical files should always be stored on home or project storage.

Users should expect that services will be restored no earlier than Friday, June 6th, 2025, at 5:00 PM and should monitor their email for updates from RCD.

Please feel free to reach out to RCD with any questions or concerns that you have about the maintenance work by submitting a support ticket – we would love to hear from you!

Posted in Announcements, Maintenance Notices

RCD Town Hall on April 23, 2025

Posted on by Ben Godfrey

The Research Computing and Data (RCD) team plans to host a Town Hall event on April 23rd, 2025 at 3 PM to share some imporant updates with the community.

Below is a summary of what we will cover:

  • changes to RCD personnel
  • plans for the Spring 2025 maintenance window
  • new compute nodes added to Palmetto 2
  • upcoming Granite environment for CUI, PHI, and NIST 800-171 (NIH) research
  • updates to ReDCAT leadership
  • updates to Indigo storage expiration notifications
  • rollout of new Job Defense Shield tool

This event is open to all Clemson University students, faculty, and staff. Please register online if you plan to attend.

Register for the Town Hall

For those unable to join us, we will post the slide deck and recording here after the event. Come back for updates!

Posted in Announcements

Work For Us! RCD Internship Opportunities

Posted on by Doug Dawson

The Research Computing and Data (RCD) group in Clemson Computing and Information Technology (CCIT) is seeking interns to support Clemson’s goal to increase research capacity. Interns in this position will learn the basics of high-performance computing and will support researchers making use of advanced cyber infrastructure including the Palmetto 2 Cluster and Indigo Data Lake.

As an RCD intern, you will be responsible for supporting the RCD staff in several areas, including:

  • User Support. You will provide the first line of support for researchers, triaging requests, answering the ones you are able to, and assigning others to the subject matter expert within the RCD staff.
  • Documentation Updates. You will help review and test RCD user facing documentation and make updates as needed.
  • Hardware Operations. When large cluster hardware changes are needed (installation or removal), you will assist the infrastructure team in the data center. This may involve lifting heavy equipment.

As interns gain more knowledge, in addition to the main support role, they will have the opportunity to work on advanced projects. The RCD staff will help match you with project topics areas such as AI/ML, software engineering, HPC software management, bioinformatics, or computational material science.

Ideal candidates should:

  • have experience with Linux operating systems
  • enjoy technical challenges
  • have a strong work ethic
  • be punctilious
  • have an aptitude to learn

For more details on the position, please review our Position Description.

To apply, please use the CCIT Student Employment Application and select “RCD Intern” as the preferred position.

Posted in Announcements

Partial Outage for Palmetto on February 24th

Posted on by Ben Godfrey

There will be a partial outage on February 24, 2025, at 9 AM. We expect the maintenance to take approximately one hour to complete. 

We have identified an unexpected issue with one of the network switches in Palmetto, requiring us to reboot the switch. This will only affect a subset of compute nodes on Palmetto. 

We are preventing new jobs from landing on the affected nodes to minimize disruptions. Jobs currently running on these nodes will be allowed to continue until the maintenance period begins. Users will still be able to log in, submit jobs, and use other RCD services, such as Open OnDemand. However, please keep in mind that you may experience extended wait times due to the affected compute nodes. 

We have chosen to perform this emergency maintenance as soon as possible to avoid a larger, unplanned outage. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. 

If you have any questions, please reach out to us by submitting a support ticket.

Posted in Announcements, Maintenance Notices

Data Transfer Node Replacement Maintenance

Posted on by Ben Godfrey

We are replacing our old Data Transfer nodes with new Data Transfer nodes on Tuesday, 02/11/2025 at 9:00 am. We expect the replacement process to take about 2 hours.

There will be no change to the Data transfer node names and details. Users will not have to update any details on their end.

Active SCP/SFTP transfers will be interrupted during this time. Globus transfers should be able to restart after the new nodes come online.

Please reach out to us if you have any questions or concerns by submitting a support ticket.

Posted in Announcements, Maintenance Notices

Spring 2025 Workshop Schedule Released

Posted on by Doug Dawson

The RCDE team is excited to announce our Spring 2025 workshop series, available free to any Clemson University student, faculty, or staff member!

Our series will cover various high-performance computing, machine learning, and software development topics. Here’s a summary of what we’ll cover:

  • Introduction to Linux
  • Introduction to Research Computing on Palmetto
  • Introduction to Nextflow
  • Advanced Nextflow
  • Running LLMs on Palmetto
  • Fine-tuning LLMs on Palmetto
  • Advanced Deep Learning in Pytorch
  • Research Computing with Kubernetes

You can learn more about the details of each workshop, the schedule, and registration links on the upcoming live training sessions page of our documentation site. 

Use our online registration system to secure your spot!

We look forward to the workshops and hope to see you there. Please submit a support ticket if you have any questions or suggestions.

Posted in Announcements

Winter 2024 Maintenance is Complete!

Posted on by Ben Godfrey

RCD and Duke Energy have completed the planned maintenance work for this week. All RCD services are now available to users again.

For details about the completed work, see the RCD maintenance post and the Duke Energy maintenance post.

If you have any questions about this maintenance work or are experiencing issues, please do not hesitate to submit a support ticket to let us know.

Posted in Announcements, Maintenance Notices

Winter 2024 Maintenance Reminders

Posted on by Ben Godfrey

Before the start of winter break, we wanted to remind you about our upcoming maintenance and let you know about a scheduled power outage that will affect Palmetto.

Summary of Outage Dates:

  • RCD Maintenance: Friday, December 20th
  • Duke Energy Maintenance Part 1: Monday, December 23rd
  • Duke Energy Maintenance Part 2: Friday, December 27th

We had previously announced our Winter 2024 maintenance plans, which will occur this Friday (December 20th) between 9:00 AM and 11:59 PM. See the Winter 2024 maintenance blog post for more details.

Additionally, Duke Energy has recently notified us that they will need to perform maintenance on power infrastructure at the data center during the holidays next week. This is necessary to resolve unmitigated impacts due to Hurricane Helene and ensure our energy supply remains stable. This maintenance will cause a partial power outage affecting some parts of Palmetto.

They will complete the power maintenance in two parts, with the first scheduled for Monday, December 23rd and the second planned for Friday, December 27th. We expect the cluster to be down starting at 7:00 AM and for power to be restored no later than 6:00 PM on both dates.

The same notes regarding job cancellation, job queueing, and scratch space as our other scheduled maintenance apply (see the Winter 2024 maintenance blog post for details).

As always, if you have any questions about this maintenance work, please submit a support ticket.

Posted in Announcements, Maintenance Notices

Upcoming Winter 2024 Maintenance

Posted on by Ben Godfrey

The RCD team wants to remind everyone about our upcoming Winter 2024 maintenance window on December 20thbetween 9:00 AM and 11:59 PM.

While maintenance work is in progress, all RCD services will be unavailable, including Palmetto 2, Open OnDemand, RCD GitLab, RCD Mattermost, and the Indigo Data Lake. Any batch jobs submitted before maintenance that cannot be completed in time will be held in the queue, but all interactive jobs will be canceled. Data transfers will be interrupted, so please complete them ahead of time to avoid possible corruption.

During this maintenance window, our engineers will work on the following:

  • Changes to the research network configuration to improve performance. Making these changes will disrupt connections to Indigo storage, so they must be completed during a maintenance window.
  • Installation of software updates for RCD GitLab.
  • There are no plans to purge scratch space. However, users are encouraged to ensure they do not have any valuable data stored in scratch space, as always.

If you have any questions about this maintenance work, please submit a support ticket.

Posted in Announcements, Maintenance Notices