Research Computing and Data

We are excited to announce that the Summer 2024 maintenance work was completed successfully. All RCD services have been restored and are ready for users to access.

During the maintenance period, we made the following improvements:

• Critical updates to network and storage infrastructure were completed.
  • These improvements have improved performance and stability for all users of the cluster.
• GitLab was updated to a new major version, v17.2.2.
• ColdFront was updated to v1.9.0.
  New features include:
  • Ability to request a GitLab group.
  • GitLab group provides enhanced features for organizing projects and repositories under a common namespace, simplifying permission management and collaboration on larger, team-based initiatives.
  • PIs can create GitLab groups by requesting a GitLab Group Allocation on ColdFront.
  • To learn more, please see the GitLab Group Allocation documentation page.
• Slurm was upgraded to v24.05.2.
  • Spack MPI modules built with the old version of Slurm will need to be rebuilt.
• Some MPI-enabled modules were moved in the module hierarchy.
  • The following were affected:
    • fftw/3.3.10
    • hdf5/1.14.3
    • netcdf-c/4.9.2
    • netcdf-cxx4/4.3.1
    • netcdf-fortran/4.6.1
    • netlib-scalapack/2.2.0
    • osu-micro-benchmarks/7.3
    • parallel-netcdf/1.12.3
  • To load any moved modules, you must first load the openmpi/5.0.1 module.
• Additionally, some AMD-optimized MPI modules were moved in the module hierarchy.
  • The following were affected:
    • amdfftw/4.1
    • amdscalapack/4.1
    • lammps/20231121
  • To load these packages, you must first load both the openmpi/5.0.1 and aocc/4.1.0 modules.
• These changes were made to better reflect the dependencies of certain packages and distinguish between MPI and non-MPI packages of the same version:
  • HDF5 was recompiled with support for C++, Fortran, High-Level APIs (hl).
    • 2 versions of HDF5 are available, one with MPI and one without.
  • hdf5/1.14.2 was upgraded to hdf5/1.14.3 (non-MPI)
• CUDA-Aware Open MPI was rebuilt with better support for multi-node GPU detection when using Kokkos.
  • Users need to rebuild Lammps following the instructions at https://github.com/clemsonciti/palmetto-examples/tree/master/LAMMPS/SLURM

We appreciate your patience during the maintenance period and hope that these changes will improve the user experience.

If you have any questions or have encountered post-maintenance issues, please let us know by submitting a support ticket.

The RCD team has scheduled a brief maintenance window at the end of the Summer 2024 semester.

The maintenance work will begin on Monday, August 12th, 2024 at 9:00 am. All RCD services, including the Palmetto Cluster and the Indigo Data Lake, will be unavailable until the maintenance work is complete.

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

• Our system administrators will perform critical updates to the network and storage systems for Palmetto 2.
  • These updates will improve performance and stability for all users on the cluster.
  • These changes are not directly user-facing and should not break any existing user workflows.
• Slurm will be updated to a new version.
  • Packages built with MPI will be updated to link with the updated Slurm MPI libraries.

This page will be updated with more details about the work completed after maintenance is over.

Users should expect that RCD services will be restored no earlier than Wednesday, August 14th, 2024 at 9:00 am and should monitor email for updates from RCD.

Please feel free to reach out to us with any questions or concerns that you have about this notice by submitting a support ticket – our team would love to hear from you!

The RCD team has scheduled a maintenance window to complete major changes to the Palmetto Cluster and other systems at the end of the Spring semester.

This work will begin on Monday, May 6th, 2024, at 9:00 am. While maintenance work is in progress, all RCD services, including the Palmetto Cluster and the Indigo Data Lake, will be unavailable.

During this maintenance window, the RCD team will complete the following updates, which may have user impact:

1. The Palmetto 2 (Slurm) cluster will move into general availability.
2. Additional nodes will move into Palmetto 2:
   • All nodes in owner queues
   • All nodes from HDR phases
3. Our new allocation management system, ColdFront, will become available.
   • Current Palmetto 1 (PBS) accounts do not grant access to Palmetto 2.
   • Current Palmetto 1 users must use ColdFront to request new allocations to make use of Palmetto 2
   • No new accounts will be added to Palmetto 1 (PBS). 
4. /scratch1 and /fastscratch will be decommissioned and will no longer be available.
   • All data on /scratch1 and /fastscratch will be erased.
5. /scratch will be re-initialized.
   • All data on /scratch will be erased.
     
6. ZFS systems are being decommissioned.
   • ZFS storage owners have been contacted about transitioning to the new storage system.
   • All data stored on ZFS file systems will be migrated to the Indigo Data Lake, so no data will be lost.
   • If you are a ZFS storage owner and have not received an email from us, please reach out to us.
     
7. A new software module system will be introduced for Palmetto 2 (Slurm). This system will provide a more user-friendly and efficient way to manage software installations and versions.
   
8. A refreshed Open OnDemand interface will be available for Slurm. The OnDemand interface will be updated to provide a more modern and user-friendly experience for Slurm users.
   
9. A new job monitoring and visualization tool, jobstats, will be deployed across the cluster. This new tool allows users to monitor their jobs more easily and efficiently and will replace many existing monitoring methods.

Users should expect that services will be restored no earlier than Friday, May 13th, 2024, at 5:00 pm and should monitor their email for updates from RCD.

We understand that these changes are significant and want to help users transition smoothly. RCD will make updated documentation, training/tutorial sessions, and additional support resources available after maintenance.

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!

The RCD team has planned a scheduled maintenance window for the Palmetto Cluster between Thursday, January 4th and Sunday, January 7th, 2024. Users should expect the cluster to be unavailable during this time, and any jobs running when maintenance begins will be canceled.