Author: Matt Moersen

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.

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.

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.