Research Computing and Data

We’d like to announce the pilot of our new RCD LLM Service. This service provides no-cost API access to leading open-weight models to all Clemson users.

The service provides access through common API formats including:

• OpenAI Compatible Chat Completions
• OpenAI Compatible Embedding
• OpenAI Compatible Responses
• Anthropic Compatible Messages

These APIs are widely supported by many AI tools and libraries, including coding assistants such as OpenAI Codex, Claude Code, and OpenCode; chat and RAG interfaces such as OpenWebUI and AnythingLLM; and software libraries such as Pydantic AI, LangChain, and OpenAI SDKs.

There are no set rate limits or token quotas. Instead the API has a fair-share scheduling mechanism built in so that if the underlying hardware becomes saturated, requests are held before sending to the underlying engine with priority based on recent usage.

Check out our documentation for details. To get started, you will need to request an allocation in a process similar to Palmetto, then you can register API keys.

As documented in our Acceptable Use Guidelines, any use of the service must remain consistent with Clemson University IT policies, Clemson AI guidance, and any sponsor, contract, or regulatory requirements that apply to your work. Non-academic personal and commercial use is prohibited.

We are excited to announce that the Spring 2026 maintenance work was completed successfully.

All RCD services have been restored and are ready for users to access.

The RCD completed the following tasks:

• Critical updates to network and storage infrastructure were completed.
  • These updates have improved performance and stability for all users of the cluster
• Critical Kernel updates to address CVE-2026-3141 (Copy Fail)
• Mitigations to address CVE-2026-43284 and CVE-2026-43500 (Dirty Frag)
• Nvidia driver upgraded to 580 branch (CUDA 13 support)
  • cuda/13.0.2 module added
• Slurm was upgraded to 25.11.5
• Open OnDemand was upgraded to 4.1.5
• GitLab was updated to v18.11.2

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 maintenance on Palmetto 2, the Indigo Data Lake, and other systems at the end of the Spring semester.

This work will begin on Monday, May 4th, 2026 at 9:00 AM. While maintenance work is in progress, all RCD services will be unavailable.

During the maintenance window we plan on completing the following:

• Minor OS upgrades
• Nvidia driver upgrade + CUDA 13 support
• Networking Maintenance
• Upgrade to Indigo Data Lake

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.

The Spring Maintenance is scheduled until  Monday, May 11th, 2026, at 9:00 AM. Users should monitor their email for updates from RCD in case the maintenance activities are completed ahead of schedule.

On Monday, December 22, Duke Energy will begin work on the power infrastructure at Clemson’s Data Center. This preventive maintenance is intended to improve power stability and reduce the risk of unscheduled outages in the future.

As a result, Palmetto 2, Indigo, and all other RCD services will be unavailable until the work is completed on Tuesday, December 23.

Any batch jobs that cannot finish before the maintenance window will be held in the queue, but all interactive jobs will be canceled. Data transfers will also be interrupted during this time.

Additionally, during this maintenance window, the K20 and K40 GPUs will be retired after 13 and 11 years of service, respectively. The nodes will remain in the cluster as CPU-only nodes.

Registration is now open for Clemson HPC Day 2025, a full-day event celebrating high-performance computing (HPC), AI/ML, and computational research across campus and beyond. Registration is free!

📅 Date: Friday, September 26, 2025
🕗 Time: 8:00 AM – 4 PM
📍 Location: Watt Family Innovation Center, Clemson University
🍽️ Includes: Continental breakfast, lunch, and giveaways

See our call for abstracts if you’d like to share your work in a poster or lightning talk. (Deadline September 5.)

This event is open to all Clemson faculty, students, researchers, and staff—whether you’re a seasoned Palmetto user, want to know more about how HPC can accelerate your work, or want to find out about HPC career paths for Clemson students. 

👉 Event details, speakers, and full schedule:

Happy First Day of Classes! As the Fall semester begins, the RCD team has a few announcements to share.

📚 Fall 2025 RCD Workshop Series

The RCDE Team is excited to announce our Fall 2025 workshop series, which is available free of charge to all Clemson students, faculty, and staff. This semester we have two brand new workshops on AI and Machine Learning. Check out the training schedule to learn more! 

🎓 Classroom OnDemand applications for Instructors

Are you teaching a class that utilizes RStudio or Jupyter on Palmetto? Check out our Classroom OnDemand site! Instructors can request a custom environment to be created for their course. More information can be found on our documentation website.

We look forward to seeing you at the upcoming workshops and wish everyone a wonderful semester!

The RCD team has scheduled a change window to perform work on the Palmetto Cluster and Indigo Data Lake on August 15th, 2025.

All services will remain online during this time and no impact to jobs is expected.

We plan on making the following changes:

• Disable AD Lockout checking on Indigo
• Removal of legacy PBS/Torque commands – users will need to switch to native Slurm commands.
  • For assistance, users should review the PBS to Slurm migration guide.
  • List of commands that will be removed:
    • mpiexec
    • pbsnodes
    • qalter
    • qdel
    • qhold
    • qrerun
    • qrls
    • qstat
    • qsub
• The default CRAN and Bioconductor location for the R modules will be set to a private mirror hosted by RCD

Please reach out to the RCD team if you have any questions or concerns.

During the week of July 21^st, several members of Clemson’s Research Computing and Data team will be attending the PEARC’25 conference.

This year, our team has four accepted publications that we will be presenting at the conference. Below are the details for each and links to helpful resources.

Update (7/15/2025 4:18PM): The necessary changes to secure the network were made with no incident.

On Monday, July 14th, the RCDI team became aware of a Palmetto related network security vulnerability that needed to be patched.  Palmetto admins made the necessary changes around 10:50 AM after a successful test.  After this change went live, connectivity between the core Ethernet network devices dropped, causing Palmetto systems and services to go offline. Administrators worked quickly to revert the changes and systems and services started to restore by 11:45. 

The RCD team apologizes for this unanticipated service interruption.

Administrators are evaluating the changes to determine why this connectivity issue occurred, and will be scheduling a time in the future to retry the necessary changes.

Interactive jobs were terminated during this outage. Some batch jobs would have also failed during this time. Users should double-check the output of their completed jobs and resubmit if necessary.

We are excited to announce that the Spring 2025 maintenance work was completed successfully. 

All RCD services have been restored and are ready for users to access.

During the maintenance period, we completed the following:

• Critical updates to network and storage infrastructure were completed.
  • These improvements have improved performance and stability for all users of the cluster.
• Three large-memory nodes were added to the cluster. Two nodes have 3TB of memory and one node has 6TB of memory.
• More AMD Genoa nodes were added to the cluster.
• Slurm was updated to 24.11.5
• Installed AMD-optimized Compiler 5.0.0 and the following dependent modules:
  • amdblis/5.0
  • amdlibflame/5.0
  • amdlibm/5.0
  • openmpi/5.0.5
    • amdscalapack/5.0
    • lammps/20240829.1
    • osu-mircro-benchmarks/7.5
• Installed the following software:
  • gcc/14.2.0
  • intel-oneapi-compilers/2025.1.1
  • cmake/3.30.5
  • intel-oneapi-mkl/2025.1.0
  • perl/5.40.0
  • r/4.5.0
  • gromacs/gromacs-2025.1-cpu
  • gromacs/gromacs-2025.1-gpu
  • comsol/6.3
  • matlab/2025a
• Spack was upgraded to v0.23.1.
  • Users of spack will be able to install newer packages provided with this update.
  • After loading the spack module, make sure to run spack clean -a to remove old temporary build files.
• Open OnDemand was upgraded to 4.0.3
  • MATLAB application was added. This will launch a native web version of MATLAB.
  • PyMOL was added as a GUI application.
• GitLab was upgraded to v17.11.3
• ColdFront was updated to v1.15

This changelog may continue to be updated as our staff finishes their release notes.

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.