Author: Ben Godfrey

During the week of July 26th, several members of Clemson’s Research Computing and Data (RCD) team will be attending the Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing (PEARC) 2026 conference in Minneapolis, MN.

While our team is away, please note that response times for user support inquiries may be delayed.

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

During today’s ReDCAT lunch event, Dr. Carl Ehrett shared updates on several new AI capabilities now available through Clemson Research Computing and Data (RCD), including the RCD LLM Service, Codex on Palmetto, and the Palmetto HPC Helper.

Highlights from the presentation included:

• Using the RCD LLM Service API endpoints with research workflows via Jupyter Notebooks
• Chatting with Clemson-hosted AI models through OpenWebUI
• Connecting Clemson-hosted models to coding assistants such as Codex and Claude Code
• Discussion of research reproducibility and long-term access to open-weight AI models
• Demonstration of the Palmetto HPC Helper, a custom GPT grounded in Palmetto documentation

A recording of this presentation is available below.

If the video player does not appear, use this direct link to the recording instead.

To learn more about these services, please see documentation for the RCD LLM Service and Codex on Palmetto. If you have questions, feel free to contact the RCD team.

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!

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.

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.

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

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:

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

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!

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.

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

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.