This was sent as an email to all cluster users on Nov 1st, 2024. It has been edited here to provide additional information about moving data. We’re excited to introduce netscratch, a high-performance scratch filesystem powered by Vast Data. After thorough evaluation, Vast Data’s advanced flash technology stood out for its performance and scalability, making it our solution ...

POWERUP COMPLETE 6:20PM See Status Page   The yearly power downtime at our Holyoke data center, MGHPCC, has been scheduled.  This year the power outage will take place on a Wednesday/Thursday the week before the Memorial Day long weekend (Mon. 5/27/24). Ordinarily this is happens during a Monday/Tuesday or Tuesday/Wednesday timeframe, but due to scheduling conflicts with ...

Summary FASRC is adding 216 Intel Sapphire Rapids nodes with 1TB of RAM each, 4 Intel Sapphire Rapids nodes with 2TB of RAM each and 144 A100 80GB GPUs to the Cannon cluster. The Sapphire Rapids cores will be made available in the new ‘sapphire’ partition. The new A100 GPUs will be added to the ‘gpu’ ...

DOWNTIME COMPLETE The annual multi-day power downtime at MGHPCC (https://www.rc.fas.harvard.edu/blog/2023-downtime/) is complete (with exceptions noted below). Normal service resumes today (Friday June 9th) at 9am. As noted in previous communications, many changes have been made to the cluster and software. If you run jobs on the cluster and did not previously try out the test cluster, you ...

by Paul Edmon June 3, 2022 A common pitfall of High Performance Computing (HPC) scheduling is cluster fragmentation.  This is not unique to HPC mind you, any system where you have a limited amount of space that you try to fill with quasi random sized blocks of stuff will end up fragmented at some level (see ...

Some faces you may recognize in a video from one of our hardware partners discussing how modern HPC is revolutionizing drug and other health-related discoveries. Miss Annie Jump Cannon also makes an appearance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syLHtxOH9Rc

  We have some exciting news about new resources we want to share with you. In the summer of 2019 we invested in direct water cooling and were able to bring you the Cannon cluster with 32,000 of the fastest Intel Cascade Lake cores. This 8-rack block of compute has formed the core of our computational ...

AUDIENCE: All Python/Conda users IMPACT: Potential malicious packages installed or malware downloaded Numerous packages containing malware/malicious links have been uploaded to the PyPI (Python Package Index) repository. Many of these have names which are slight misspellings of the names of other packages. The intention is to cause an installation of one of these packages if the package ...

2020 - A year full of changes   2020 began somewhat normally, except that the world was coming to grips with a global pandemic. By February plans were being formed for a probable change to 100% remote work for FASRC staff. This became a reality in March and we bid our offices in '38' farewell for some ...

by Paul Edmon December 2, 2020 Back in 2008, the Odyssey supercomputer was installed on the seventh floor of the Markely-Boston co-location data center at 1 Summer Street, Boston, Massachusetts.  Until this point Harvard had not really been a player in the realm of supercomputing, unlike other major universities who had been doing so for decades.  ...

by Paul Edmon, September 1, 2020 One of the features of our scheduling software, Slurm, is that it has a max JobID of 67,043,328 (for the fascinating reason why see the Slurm docs).  This means that when we hit that limit the JobID rolls over to 1 and starts counting again from there.  We thought this ...

On-going work July - ? in our Boston data center Due to scheduling of resources around pandemic guidelines and rules, as well as scheduling with the data center and vendors, an end date is not yet known. As part of cost-savings plans, FASRC and Harvard Medical School will be combining space in our Boston data center. This ...

A bit of fun before the holiday break. One thing that people in our profession can count on is 'your first computer'. There is one for each of us, and generally they hold a special place in our hearts and very often they're tied to holidays or birthdays. We did an impromptu survey of FASRC (as ...

The November 2019 Top 500 List has just added Cannon, and we're very pleased to say we've ranked #144 overall and # 7 on the US academic list. We and the Harvard FAS are very proud to have Cannon in such a prominent position in the list. It demonstrates Harvard's commitment to pushing the envelope ...

by Paul Edmon, November 20, 2019 Currently in the realm of computer science there is no hotter topic than Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML).  However as this slide deck from Professor Arvind Narayanan at Princeton notes there is also a lot of snake oil going around too.  Thus an understanding of AI is important ...

by Maggie McFee - Nov. 13, 2019   While attending the PEARC conference, Maggie and Austin ran into some of our Yale Research Computing counterparts: Kaylea, Robert, and Ben. While there's an intense sports rivalry between the two schools, this wasn't the case with our RC departments. We really hit it off well and we talked about ...