We will provide an update by 5:00 PM today.

Your access to Brown nodes will be terminated on November 8, however you can still access your files stored on Brown storage until December 6, 2023.

We recommend that you start archiving your data to appropriate storage systems: you can use Fortress for long term data archival, e.g. cold storage of data that you do not need to access in the foreseeable future; data that is used in any ongoing work can be moved to other clusters or Data Depot. Instructions on how to transfer data to Fortress can be found in the Fortress User Guide - File Transfer Section, and you can contact rcac-help@purdue.edu with any questions. You may also use Globus for any data transfer needs you may have.

After Wednesday, December 6th 2023, RCAC STAFF WILL NOT be able to retrieve any data left in the Brown scratch filesystem.

Shares in our latest community cluster, Negishi, are available for purchase now. Negishi has considerable advantages over Brown in many respects -- Negishi nodes contain significantly more processing cores that can be scheduled for jobs, and Negishi will provide greater ability to take advantage of standby scheduling. Each Negishi node contains 256 GB of RAM. In addition, Negishi has faster networking, and a faster and larger scratch filesystem to improve your processing efficiency.

Brown served the community for more than six years. All Brown nodes will be decommissioned and salvaged due to their age. If you currently own nodes on Brown, you may receive a small credit ($100/node) which can be applied towards purchase of Negishi shares. Please contact us at rcac-help@purdue.edu if you have any questions.

Globus transfers to/from Data Depot may experience slowdowns as well. The SMB/Windows network drive functionality is not affected.

We appreciate the incident reports we received. RCAC engineers are working with the vendor on diagnosing and troubleshooting the issue.

PurdueIT is replacing our ticketing system, Footprints, with a new product called Team Dynamix (TDX).

Email to rcac-help@purdue.edu will begin to forward to the TDX environment effective Wednesday, July 12, 2023.

You may notice a difference in the format of our replies, and some new text at the bottom of the emails.

With this new system, you can also log into the service portal to see and track any open issues that you have across the entire PurdueIT system. The portal is located at https://service.purdue.edu

We are moving quickly into the new system and there will be a learning curve for Staff as well as partners. We are dedicated to learning and improving our processes as diligently as possible.

Another note for support concerns the week of July 24-28. Several of our staff will be attending an annual conference that week and responses may be slower than normal. We will watch the ticket queue and reply as we are able. Coffee hours will also be canceled for that week

Thanks for being our partner in HPC.

Rosen Center Staff

https://it.purdue.edu/login/

SSH keys will continue to work uninterrupted, and users of ACCESS systems will see no change to their accounts/access. Only BoilerKey-based login to RCAC systems will be affected by this change. There may be interruptions in login via BoilerKey and Purdue Login around the time of transition just before and after midnight.

We will post a more detailed guide on the exact changes and impacts observed to RCAC systems on Tuesday, June 27th. Thank you for your patience during this big transition for Purdue!

During this time, Brown will have the operating system patched and an update done to the Slurm job scheduler.

Any Slurm job which requests walltime extending past Wednesday, May 10, 2023 at 7:30am EDT will not begin until after maintenance concludes.

We will provide an update by 5pm.

Research Computing staff members will monitor the status of all computing and data resources in an effort to ensure continuous availability.

Research Computing staff members will monitor the ticketing system throughout the holiday period and respond to critical issues and problems. Non-critical user issues and questions will be addressed beginning Tuesday, January 3rd, 2023. There will also be no coffee hour consultations during this break.

Scratch file purging (on community clusters with scratch space) will continue as normal during the break, so be sure to archive your files in scratch storage or check for any upcoming purge warning emails during the break. This does not apply to Data Depot or home directories -- only scratch storage.

Have a wonderful break, everyone, and we look forward to great things in the new year!

We will provide an update by 3pm.

For instructions on transferring your files from your legacy home directory to your new home directory, see our updated guidance linked here.

Any Slurm jobs which request a walltime which would take them past 8:00am EDT on Thursday, September 1st will not start before this maintenance work.

Everyone will be given a new, empty, home directory on Brown with a 25 GB limit. Please use one of the following methods to copy files from your current legacy home directory to your new Brown home directory:

• Globus: A new Globus endpoint, “Purdue Brown Cluster - Home Directories”, has been created for your new Brown home directory. You can select and transfer files and folders from your legacy home directory to your new Brown home using Globus. Here is a direct link to the Transfer Brown Home Directory Files page. Globus does not normally show hidden files and folders such as “.bashrc”, so you will want to enable the “Show Hidden Items” option to allow you to see and transfer these configuration files (the eye-in-folder icon under the “hamburger” options menu). Still more information on how to use Globus may be found in the Brown User Guide - Globus Transfer Section

• copy-rcac-home: This is a custom tool which will transfer most of your current legacy home directory contents to your new Brown home directory. You need to log in to a Brown front-end host and run copy-rcac-home in a terminal. For more details, see the Brown User Guide - copy-rcac-home Section.

• Unix tools: You may also use typical command line utilities such as cp and rsync to copy files from your legacy home directory to your new Brown home directory. Your new Brown home directory is already available under /home-new/$USER. After the maintenance, your legacy home directory will be available under /home-old/$USER and will remain available for several weeks after the transition.

On September 1st, your home directory on Brown will switch from the current legacy home directory to the new Brown home directory. If you have not copied your shell configuration files or research work files prior to this, you will need to then do so in order to continue using Brown as you had been. On October 1st, your old legacy home directory will no longer be available on Brown.

If you use Windows to access your Brown home directory, following this transition you will need to update your drive mapping as follows:

• Windows: \\home.brown.rcac.purdue.edu\brown-home
• MacOS or Linux: smb://home.brown.rcac.purdue.edu/brown-home

Please reach out to rcac-help@purdue.edu if you have any questions about this transition.

We will provide an update by 6pm.

During this time, Physical Facilities crew will perform work on the cooling system in the POD data center. In addition, will have their Slurm scheduler updated to the latest version to fix a recently-discovered software bug.

Any Slurm jobs which request a walltime which would take them past Tuesday, June 14th, 2022 at 6:00am EDT will not start and will remain in the queue until after the maintenance is completed.

We apologize for the disruption of service. Please contact rcac-help@purdue.edu if you have any questions.

System engineers are actively engaged with the vendor to troubleshoot and fix the glitch. We appreciate your patience and will provide another update by 6pm.

The clusters will return to full production by Wednesday, March 16th, 2022 at 12:00pm EDT.

Any SLURM jobs which request a walltime which would take them past Tuesday, March 15th, 2022 at 4:00pm EDT will not start and will remain in the queue until after the maintenance is completed. Please note that the downtime for the clusters is longer than the Whole-Floor Data Depot Maintenance (due to extra time required to bring clusters down and back up once the actual Data Depot work is completed).

The cluster began experiencing issues with the Data Depot filesystem around 5:45pm EST on Friday, February 11th, 2022. Engineers are currently diagnosing the issue and are working to identify a fix. Job scheduling has been paused while this issue is being addressed.

We will provide an update later tonight.

Research Computing staff members will monitor the status of all computing and data resources in an effort to ensure continuous availability.

Research Computing staff members will monitor the ticketing system throughout the holiday period and answer critical user questions. Non-critical user questions will be addressed beginning Monday, January 3rd, 2022. There will also be no coffee hour consultations during this break.

Scratch file purging (on community clusters with scratch space) will continue as normal during the break, so be sure to archive your files in scratch storage or check for any upcoming purge warning email during the break. This does not apply to Data Depot or home directories -- only scratch storage.

Have a wonderful break, everyone, and we look forward to great things in the new year!