Research Computing and Data

RCD Town Hall on December 6th, 2023

The Research Computing and Data (RCD) team plans to hold a town hall event on Wednesday, December 6th, 2023 from 2-3 p.m. via Zoom. Join us to hear updates about:

  • An introduction to new members of the RCD team.
  • An introduction to the new Indigo Data Lake storage system.
  • The upcoming beta period for the new cluster using the SLURM scheduler.
    • Including training opportunities.
  • Our plans for modernizing the hardware in the cluster and improving hardware stability.
  • Reminder about the upcoming decommission of /scratch1 and /fastscratch in Summer 2024.
  • … and more!

Any current student or employee is welcome to participate.

Update: Did you miss the Town Hall? You can watch the recording or view the slides online.
Note: Users must log in with through Clemson SSO to view these resources, which will be available until January 31st, 2024.

Upcoming Maintenance for Summer 2023

The RCD team has planned a scheduled maintenance window for the Palmetto Cluster between Monday, July 10th and Friday, July 14th, 2023. Users should expect the cluster to be unavailable during this time, and any jobs running when maintenance begins will be canceled.

We’ll be working on:

  • Introducing a new mini-cluster as a test for the SLURM scheduler, which will replace PBS on Palmetto during a future maintenance window.
  • Updating configuration on compute nodes to improve I/O performance to the Indigo data lake.
  • Preparing for the end-of-life for /scratch1 and /fastscratch, which is planned for July of 2024.
  • Upgrading infiniband drivers to improve stability and NVIDIA drivers to support newer versions of CUDA.

RCD Town Hall on June 20th, 2023

The Research Computing and Data (RCD) group held a town hall on Tuesday, June 20, 2023, from 2-3 p.m. via Zoom. We shared with the community that:

  • The condominium model is alive and well. Palmetto will remain available for everyone at Clemson to use at no charge, and faculty can purchase nodes for priority use.
  • We reviewed new services launched by RCD since the last town hall, including our new documentation, GitLab, Mattermost, XDMoD, and our beta Kubernetes service.
  • We have started a new user group, the REDCAT Advisory Body, to help facilitate conversations between faculty and RCD.
  • We covered our progress on the infrastructure refresh announced at the last town hall.
  • We announced the upcoming maintenance period for Palmetto between July 10th and 14th and provided details about what work will be completed.
  • We discussed the future of job scheduling on Palmetto 2 with SLURM and our plans to assist researchers transitioning from PBS.
  • We announced our new Indigo Data Lake storage system backed by VAST with all NVMe flash media and discussed the future of research storage purchases.
  • We let everyone know that our team will be attending the PEARC 23 conference and expect delays in response to support tickets between July 22nd and July 28th.

For more details, please review the slide deck and webinar recording of the town hall (Clemson login required).

RCDE Announces Summer 2023 Workshop Series

The RCDE team is excited to announce our Summer 2023 workshop series! We have 12 workshops planned, which are offered for free to any interested Clemson University students, faculty, or staff members.

Our series will cover various high-performance computing, machine learning, and software development topics. Here’s a summary of what we’ll cover:

  • Introduction to Linux
  • Introduction to Research Computing on Palmetto
  • Advanced Research Computing on Palmetto
  • Introduction to Python Programming
  • Data Processing and Visualization in Python
  • Introduction to R Programming
  • Introduction to Big Data Analytics using Spark and Python
  • Introduction to Git Version Control with GitLab
  • Machine learning in Python (sklearn)
  • Machine learning in R (caret)
  • Introduction to Deep Learning in PyTorch
  • Advanced Deep Learning in PyTorch

You can learn more about the details of each workshop, the schedule, and registration links on the upcoming live training sessions page of our documentation site.

Register today through our online system to secure your spot!

You may register up to three weeks in advance, but we ask that you cancel your registration if you can’t attend since space is limited. We also encourage you to join us in person for the best interactive experience, but some workshops have virtual attendance options if you need to join us remotely.