Dear HPCF Users,

I wanted to make sure you knew that I am offering Math 447/627 Introduction to Parallel Computing this fall again. It has both an undergraduate and graduate level.

The class is a community building effort for all users of taki and ada, since you would meet other users as well as learn how to make use of the resources most effectively.

The syllabus is on my webpage at www.umbc.edu/~gobbert (under the Teaching area near the top) with a detailed schedule. This class is specifically designed to be interdisciplinary and accessible to students from a wide range of disciplines and backgrounds.

I am planning to offer the class in HyFlex mode with both in-person and online attendance. Other modalities are possible, too, to reach the largest number of users.

The goal is for half of the semester to be an individual project, intended to be in and further your ongoing research, with a report and oral presentation. In this way, the class is supposed to further your research immediately and not distract from it.

Please, forward this to anyone else (user or not) and other students in particular.

Do not hesitate to contact me for information at gobbert@umbc.edu

Thank you,

Matthias Gobbert

Dept. of Math & Stat

To all taki users,

Users can begin normal use of the taki cluster environment. Running jobs at the start of the downtime were unaffected.

Roy Prouty

UMBC HPCF System Administrator

To all taki users,

System administrators are aware of issues with SLURM. At present, SLURM is not responding as expected to allocation requests and running jobs cannot be monitored. Running jobs are likely unaffected, but we will confirm after resolving the above issues.

I will send another message with that information when the issue has been resolved.

Roy Prouty

UMBC HPCF System Administrator

To all taki users,

tl;dr: Equipment from 2013 (both the batch and gpu partitions) will be disabled on August 15, 2023.

These Dell PowerEdge R620 & R720 nodes were purchased in 2013 as a part of an NSF MRI “Acquisition of Hybrid CPU/GPU Nodes for the Interdisciplinary UMBC High Performance Computing Facility”. After installation, this hardware constituted the bulk of the UMBC community resource known as the maya cluster as a part of the UMBC HPCF. While these nodes represented the majority of the computing power of the cluster from 2013-2018, they have been supplanted by the 2017 MRI purchase, and the 2019 GPU ada cluster purchase and no longer see much usage. 

In addition, for the past year and a half, the utilization of the 2013 hardware partitions (batch and gpu) has been persistently decreasing to what is now a small fraction of their historical monthly utilization*. Also, the advanced age of the hardware is leading to more frequent hardware failures in these partitions, many of which cause jobs to fail, leading to lost work in addition to staff-hours associated with triage and repair. These nodes are also the least energy efficient of the cluster, using more power and cooling than the newer, more reliable nodes. 

Given all of these points, we will be disabling these partitions on August 15, 2023 so we can focus on keeping a high-performing and reliable cluster for the campus community.

Since 2013, other NSF MRIs (in 2017 & 2019) and various community buy-ins orchestrated by dedicated faculty and staff have grown the UMBC HPCF into what is now two clusters, ada and taki. As noted above, these machines represent comparable compute power with less demand of power, cooling, and maintenance by UMBC HPCF System Administrators.

We encourage any remaining workflows utilizing the 2013 nodes to transition to the newer hardware. As always, if you have any questions, comments, or concerns–please submit an RT ticket via the form found at 

(https://doit.umbc.edu/request-tracker-rt/doit-research-computing/) or by navigating to hpcf.umbc.edu > “Forms” > “HPCF Help Request Form”.

Roy Prouty

UMBC HPCF System Administrator

*For more information about usage trends on the taki cluster, see (http://hpcf-files.umbc.edu/research/usage_statistics.pdf) or navigate to hpcf.umbc.edu > “Research” > “Usage Statistics”

At 16:55, large portions of the taki cluster were abruptly taken offline by administrators to help with an unexpected chiller failure in the data center. 

This unfortunately means that all running jobs were lost. 

I will send another message when the issue has been resolved.

Happy Friday!

Roy Prouty

UMBC HPCF System Administrator

To all taki users,

The maintenance downtime for the taki cluster environment is complete. Feel free to begin using the system.

We are aware of a few nodes that are down in the batch partition. These nodes are down due to a network hardware issue that will be resolved soon.

As always, let us know if you have any questions or concerns by submitting a descriptive help request form found at the following link.

Roy Prouty

HPCF System Administrator

Dear HPCF Community,

This upcoming Tuesday, 09/27/2022, 12:00noon-01:00pm, virtual online meeting, we have the chance to talk Intel engineers about their products.

They will provide an update on HPC technologies across Xeon CPUs, HPC software and compilers, AI optimizations, future roadmaps and more.   Please come with any questions, they want this as interactive as possible.

If you receive this as an e-mail, go to myUMBC -> Groups -> HPCF to find it as a post. The following link should get you the Webex meeting:

https://www.google.com/url?q=https://umbc.webex.com/umbc/j.php?MTID%3Dme273499e68c316bfcefc5b1e94c1d2ae&sa=D&source=calendar&usg=AOvVaw1TEIF3qgRhLv7UAPMiyFqf

E-mail me with any questions at gobbert@umbc.edu

And by the way, always remember to send me information on publications (including senior, MS, and PhD theses)!  Documenting them on the webpage is a key measure of our success.

Matthias Gobbert, Department of Mathematics and Statistics

Chair Governance Committee

To all HPCF users,

Our work bringing the HPCF research storage servers up-to-date has concluded. Please begin normal use of the clusters or other research computing machines.

Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns by submitting a descriptive help request form found at the following link.

Roy Prouty

HPC System Administrator

To all HPCF users,

On Tuesday September 13, 2022 both HPCF clusters (ada & taki) as well as the other compute systems that make use of HPCF Research Storage will be down and inaccessible from 3pm - 5pm ET. 

Once our work is done on Tuesday, we will make another announcement.

As always, let us know if you have any questions or concerns by submitting a descriptive help request form found at the following link.

Roy Prouty

HPCF System Administrator

Dear Researchers, Colleagues, and Students,

This is my regular reminder, coming from the HPCF Governance Committee as well as from the PI/co-PIs of the NSF MRI grant that funded a lot of the nodes of HPCF, that you please send me citations for all publications that used HPCF resources!

We want to post them to the HPCF webpage, see hpcf.umbc.edu/publications, for NSF reporting, but even more importantly in some ways, we want to impress on the UMBC administration how vital HPCF is to so many researchers and students doing their research.

To this end, please also particularly send me information on student theses (senior/undergraduate, MS, PhD)! Feel free to go back a year in checking if we have the information. If in doubt, send again.

Also update previously reported submissions, if they have been accepted or appeared now. You can always search the publications page for your own name to see what information we have. Also let me know any mistakes we might have (typos, etc.)

Matthias Gobbert, Department of Mathematics and Statistics

Chair Governance Committee and PI MRI grant