Author: Ben Godfrey

RCD Mattermost (chat.rcd.clemson.edu) has been retired effective September 21, 2026 and is no longer available.

This sudden retirement was prompted by required security updates to RCD GitLab (git.rcd.clemson.edu). Our Mattermost instance was bundled with GitLab, and support for bundled Mattermost instances was removed in GitLab 19.

Given its limited use among Palmetto users, we decided to retire RCD Mattermost and do not plan to restore it.

Going forward, we will focus on supporting users through our existing RCD support options.

We are currently investigating an outage of our Slurm controller on the Palmetto 2 cluster.

Job submission, Open OnDemand, and other tools that integrate with Slurm are impacted.

We will provide an update as soon as a fix is in place.

Research Computing and Data (RCD) is excited to announce our Fall 2026 workshop schedule.

You can view the full schedule and register for upcoming sessions here:

More workshops will be posted soon!

Featured this semester: HPC for Genomics Life Scientists 🧬

We are especially excited to offer a new HPC for Genomics Life Scientists workshop series, developed in partnership with the Clemson University Genomics and Bioinformatics Facility (CUGBF). The series is designed to help life sciences researchers understand and apply Clemson’s high-performance computing resources to genomics research.

HPC for Genomics Life Scientists: Foundations
This two-part workshop introduces the foundations of HPC for genomics research and how research computing resources can support common genomics workflows.

• Part 1: Monday, August 31
• Part 2: Wednesday, September 9
• Time: 1:00–4:30 PM
• Location: LSB 142

HPC for Genomics Life Scientists: Practical Demonstrations
This three-part workshop builds on those foundations with practical examples demonstrating how HPC resources can be applied to genomics data and analyses.

• Part 1: Monday, October 5
• Part 2: Tuesday, October 6
• Part 3: Wednesday, October 7
• Time: 1:00–4:30 PM
• Location: LSB 142

We hope to see you at a workshop this semester!

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.