RCAC to decommission Bell on October 31, 2026; Gautschi available as successor cluster
Purdue’s Rosen Center for Advanced Computing will decommission the Bell community cluster on October 31, 2026, concluding Bell’s planned service lifecycle. Bell was introduced in 2020 as a community cluster for research computing and includes standard CPU nodes, high-memory nodes, GPU nodes, and large parallel storage.
After 5:00 PM on Friday, October 30, 2026, RCAC Staff will not be able to retrieve any data left in the Bell scratch filesystem.
RCAC recommends Gautschi as the successor platform for communities currently using or considering Bell. Gautschi is in production and was introduced as RCAC’s most powerful community cluster to date, with CPU and AI partitions designed to support both traditional simulation workloads and newer AI-oriented research workflows.
For faculty comparing the two platforms, Gautschi provides more cores per CPU node, more standard memory per node, higher large-memory capacity, newer GPU options, and faster NDR InfiniBand connectivity. This makes Gautschi the natural path for Bell users who need continued access to Purdue’s community cluster model after Bell is retired.
| Feature | Bell | Gautschi |
|---|---|---|
| Status | Active now; retirement noted for the end of 2026 on the Bell page. | In production and available for faculty use. |
| Standard CPU node | 2 x 64-core AMD EPYC Rome, 256 GB RAM. | 2 x 96-core AMD EPYC Genoa, 384 GB RAM. |
| High-memory nodes | 1 TB RAM nodes. | 1.5 TB RAM nodes. |
| GPU options | AMD Instinct MI50 GPU nodes. | NVIDIA L40S and H100 GPU nodes. |
| Interconnect | 100 Gbps connection. | 200 Gbps connection. |
| Positioning | Prior-generation community cluster introduced in 2020. | Successor community cluster now in production. |
Please feel free to contact us at rcac-help@purdue.edu if you have any questions or need support.