To protect running jobs, compute nodes will be set to drain starting at 3:00am EDT on June 24. Jobs that cannot complete before 8:00am will remain pending until after the maintenance window.

No user action is required, but you may wish to adjust any time‑sensitive workflows or job submissions to avoid the maintenance period. If you have questions, please contact the RCAC help desk at rcac-help@purdue.edu.

Yanran Wu is a third-year PhD student in Computer Science at Purdue University. Wu attended GHC 25 with assistance from a WHPC scholarship. GHC, eponymously named after pioneering computer scientist Grace Hopper, is the world’s largest gathering of women in tech, bringing together thousands of women from across the globe to learn, network, and celebrate their achievements. We sat down with Wu afterwards to discuss the conference and learn about her experiences whilst there:

Can you describe your overall experience at the conference?

I had a very exciting and inspiring experience at the Grace Hopper Celebration. GHC is very different from academic conferences, and it felt like a truly unique event where women from across the tech industry come together. Everyone was very willing to share helpful information and their life experiences, which created a warm and supportive community. The conference made me feel motivated to push my research forward in ways that connect with real industry needs, and it also encouraged me to support other women in tech in the future.

What was your biggest takeaway from the conference?

My biggest takeaway on research and technology is that there are still clear gaps between current AI applications and what industry teams actually need. Through conversations with engineers, I learned that some engineers hope to develop custom AI agents that work with their internal data, but they face challenges such as low inference efficiency and the high cost of fine-tuning. These discussions helped me think more about how my research can contribute to solving these problems.

On a personal level, I learned a great deal from senior professionals who shared how they made important career choices and navigated different transitions in their lives. Their experiences showed me that each person follows a path that fits their own goals and circumstances. It encouraged me to focus on my long-term development instead of feeling pressure from external expectations.

How did support from Purdue WHPC make this experience possible for you, and how do you feel about receiving the support?

The support from Purdue WHPC made it possible for me to attend the conference, since I would not have been able to cover the travel costs on my own. It allowed me to participate fully and focus on learning, networking, and exploring new opportunities. I feel very grateful for this support, and I also see it as recognition that encourages me to stay involved in the WHPC community and continue growing as a researcher.

Would you recommend the WHPC scholarship program to other Purdue students and why?

Yes, I would definitely recommend the WHPC scholarship program to other Purdue students. It provides valuable support that makes it possible to attend important conferences and gain experiences that can shape both academic and career goals.

Did you have any prior involvement with Research Computing or WHPC?

I first became involved with Research Computing through the Gautschi Early User Program and have continued to use the Gautschi cluster since then. The advanced H100 GPUs on Gautschi allowed me to scale up my experiments and conduct detailed profiling and benchmarking for my research on sustainable AI systems and large language model serving. I am very grateful for the timely help from the RCAC staff, including Ryan [DeRue] and Haniye [Kashgarani], who supported several technical needs for my research project and made it possible for us to run our studies smoothly.

Purdue Women in High-Performance Computing Program

Purdue Women in HPC is part of a broader engagement initiative by the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing (RCAC) and is led by women staffers affiliated with RCAC. WHPC is a dedicated community encompassing undergraduate, graduate, staff, and faculty men and women who are interested in exposing women to high-performance computing and encouraging their pursuit of research and careers in HPC and other technology fields.

Within the WHPC initiative, RCAC provides partial travel assistance to undergraduate and graduate students, empowering their participation in various national conferences that align with WHPC’s objectives. The WHPC travel scholarship sends students to numerous conferences each year, most recently including the Grace Hopper Celebration, Society of Women Engineers, and Game Developers Conference (GDC) Festival of Gaming.

For full eligibility requirements, and to apply for this scholarship, please visit the WHPC Scholarship page.

In addition to the scholarship program, Purdue WHPC organizes a range of activities, including regular meetings to discuss technical HPC-related issues of interest, opportunities to network with the WHPC community, a mentorship program, workshops, and exposure to external resources and opportunities.

If you would like to attend and/or are interested in future participation, please contact us at whpc@purdue.edu. You may also subscribe to our WHPC List Serve.

Written by: Jonathan Poole, poole43@purdue.edu

Following good data practices makes scratch more performant and more useful for all users. By keeping master copies of important data in backed‑up storage, staging only the inputs and outputs you need for active jobs into scratch, and promptly moving valuable results back to a persistent location when your work completes, you help keep scratch fast, responsive, and available for high‑throughput workloads across the system.

To support this, we’ve updated our scratch documentation with clearer guidance and policies, including:

• An emphasis on scratch as temporary, high‑performance workspace, not long‑term storage.
• Clearer explanation of purge behavior and age limits (including that files may be removed at any time after they become eligible).
• Removal of legacy “purge warning email” language; users should no longer expect email notifications before files are purged.
• Explicit guidance that using tools like touch or other methods to defeat purge mechanisms is a violation of Acceptable Research Resource Use.
• Practical tips and examples for staging data into scratch, monitoring file ages with tools such as purgelist , and moving important results back to Data Depot or Fortress.

Scratch filesystems are engineered for capacity and performance and are not protected by backup technology; some types of failures can result in permanent data loss. If losing a file in scratch would significantly impact your research, that file should have a current copy in a more durable storage location such as Data Depot (for active data) or Fortress (for long‑term archival).

You can review the updated scratch storage guidance here: https://www.rcac.purdue.edu/policies/scratchpurge

If you have questions about how to adapt your workflows or where to store particular data, please contact us at rcac-help@purdue.edu and we’ll be happy to help.

Users may see failures connecting via Windows/Samba and jobs are affected because all clusters are currently paused while recovery work proceeds. Our engineers are working with the storage platform to restore service; we will share further updates as we learn more.

**Issue: **Some users may not see Microsoft Authenticator push prompts unless they manually open the app. This can cause sign-ins to time out.

Workaround: If you do not see a push notification, open the Microsoft Authenticator app and approve the pending request. Also, please verify that your default sign-in method is set to ‘App based Authentication – notification’ You can follow the steps in this Knowledge Base article to check and update your settings: https://service.purdue.edu/TDClient/32/Purdue/KB/ArticleDet?ID=1788

Still Need Help? - Contact us at rcac-help@purdue.edu

Beginning May 11, 2026, RCAC will move from Duo Mobile to Microsoft Authenticator for logging in to Purdue’s research computing and supercomputing systems.

To ensure uninterrupted access, please complete the steps below before May 11.

What you need to do:

Enroll in Microsoft Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) using the Microsoft Authenticator app (if you have not already)

Set your default sign-in method in Microsoft MFA to your preferred method

After May 11, Duo Mobile will no longer work for accessing RCAC systems.

Please contact rcac-help@purdue.edu If you have any questions or need help.

We will provide an update by noon, April 28 or sooner as work progresses.

All RCAC systems and Research Network services will remain unavailable during this extended window.

We appreciate your continued patience as we complete these critical upgrades to improve RCAC infrastructure reliability and performance.

For assistance, questions, or concerns, please contact rcac-help@purdue.edu.

Due to the outage, some jobs on Gilbreth did not requeue automatically. Users should check the status of any jobs that were running early this morning and resubmit them if needed.

**How does this impact you? ** We have paused job scheduling on the CPU nodes. You can continue to submit jobs to Gautschi nodes, however the jobs will remain queued until after the maintenance is complete.

The cooling leak does not affect Gautschi AI nodes. Therefore, those nodes continue to operate normally.

We will provide additional updates by Thursday, March 5 at 12 pm. Please reach out to rcac-help@purdue.edu if you have any questions or need support.

Impact to you Attempts to read files that are on the affected storage may result in error messages

Our IT team is actively working with the vendor to restore service as quickly as possible. We will send an update as soon as more information is available.

During this maintenance window, several clusters will experience a temporary outage so that hardware can be safely powered down while facility work is performed:

• Gautschi, Gilbreth, Negishi, Bell, and Anvil cluster nodes will be powered down.

• The Gilbreth’s legacy V100 GPUs, that are well past their lifetime, will be decommissioned.

• Hammer (Math nodes) and Geddes: A subset of nodes will be powered down but the services will be available, unless communicated separately.

How does this maintenance impact you?

• Clusters listed in this message won’t be available to run jobs during the maintenance.

• Any jobs requesting a walltime which would take them past the start of the maintenance will not start and will remain in the queue until after the maintenance is completed.

• Users can continue to access their data.

• GenAI studio will remain available. This maintenance will position Purdue to support growing computational needs. Users should see long‑term benefits in system reliability and our ability to support future computing and AI resources.

If you have questions about how this outage will affect your work or need support, please contact rcac-help@purdue.edu.