Author: ssarajlic3

XSEDE14 comes to Atlanta (July 13-18)

XSEDE 2014 is coming to town, and here’s their announcement (https://www.xsede.org/web/conference/xsede14)

Mark your calendars and join us in Atlanta for XSEDE14, July 13-18, 2014!

The annual XSEDE conference brings together the extended community of individuals interested in advancing research cyberinfrastructure and integrated digital services for the benefit of science and society. XSEDE14 will place a special emphasis on recruiting and engaging under-represented minorities, women, and students as well as encouraging participation by people from domains of study that do not traditionally use high-performance computing. Sessions will be structured to engage people who are new to computational science and engineering, as well as providing in-depth tutorials and high-quality peer-reviewed papers that will allow the most experienced researchers to gain new insights and knowledge.

Hotel and Registration deadlines extended!

The XSEDE14 Conference is shaping up to be an excellent conference! We are pleased to announce that the hotel has extended our room block rate until June 27. To align with the extended room block extension, the conference registration will remain at $500 for full conference participation through June 27. After June 27, the late registration fee of $600 will begin.

Update on widespread drive failures

After some consultation with members of the GT IT community (thank you specifically, Didier Contis for raising the awareness of the issue), as well as our vendor, we have identified the cause of the high rate of disk failures plaguing storage units purchased a little bit more than a year ago.

An update to the firmwares running on the internal backplanes of the storage arrays was necessary, and performance and availability were greatly improved immediately after these were applied on the arrays. These firmwares are normally manufacturer maintained materials only, and aren’t readily available to the public like controller firmwares are, which led to some additional delays before repairs.

That said, we have retained the firmwares and the software used to apply them for any future use should other units have issues.

Physical host failure for VMs – potential job impact

This morning (approximately between 3am and 8am) we suffered a failure in one of our physical hosts which makes up part of our VM farm. This failure caused several head nodes to go offline, as well as one of the PACE run license servers for software.

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For ALL PACE run clusters, it would be wise to double check your job runs in case they may have lost their license server prior to kicking off this morning or if it was running during this time.
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The following head nodes went offline, but have returned:
cygnus-6
granulous
megatron
microcluster
mps
rozell
testflight-6

The following license server went offline, but has returned:
license-gt

In the cases of the head nodes, no jobs should have been affected nor any data lost because of nodes being offline.

PACE Lecture Series: New Courses Scheduled

PACE is starting the lecture and training course offering once again.
Over the next two months, we are offering 4 courses:

  1. Introduction to Parallel Programming with MPI and OpenMP (July 22)
  2. Introduction to Parallel Application Debugging and Profiling (June 17)
  3. A Quick Introduction To Python (June 24)
  4. Python For Scientific Computing (July 8)

For details about where and when, or to register your attendance (each class is limited to 30 seats), visit our PACE Training page.

Disk failure rate spike

Hey everyone,

We’ve noticed an increase in a type of disk failure on some of the storage nodes that ultimately has a severe negative impact on storage performance. In particular, we observe that certain models of drives in certain manufacturing date ranges seem to be more prone to failure.

As a result, we’re looking a bit more closely at our logs to keep an eye on how widespread this is, but most of the older storage seems fine; it has tended towards some of the newer storage using both 2Tb and 4Tb drives. The 2Tb drives are the more surprising to us as the model line involved has generally been performing as expected, with many older storage units using the same drives without having these issues.

We are also engaging our vendor to see if this is something that they are seeing elsewhere, and making sure we keep a close eye on our stock of replacements to deal with these failures.

Storage slowdowns due to failing disks

CLUSTERS INVOLVED: emory/tardis, ase1

Hey folks,

We’ve gone ahead and replaced some disks in your storage as the type of failures they are generating right now cause dramatic slowdowns in I/O performance for the disk arrays.

As a result of the replacements, the array will remain slow for a period of ~5 or so hours as the arrays rebuild themselves to have the appropriate redundancy.

We’ll be keeping an eye on this problem as we have recently noticed a spike in the number of these events as of late.

Big Data Week 2014 – Atlanta

A big Big Data event with many interesting speakers. Food and drinks will be served!
You can RSVP following the link:

http://meetup.com/Atlantas-Big-Data-Week-2014/

(needs a meetup account)

Monday, May 5, 2014 to

250 14th Street, NW , Atlanta, GA 30361

Parking is free in the deck.

Panelists

• Moderator – Bloomberg‘s Duane Stanford

• Delta‘s Russell Pierce, Managing Director of Customer Data & Analytics

• Home Depot‘s Steven Einbender, Lead Advanced Analytics Architect

• Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta‘s Michael Thompson, VP of Business Intelligence

• AirWatch‘s John Marshall, CEO

• Weather Company‘s Eli Phetteplace, Director of Enterprise Data

Agenda

• 5-7 – networking and sponsor showcase

• 7-7:30 – introductions and intro to Big Data Week

• 7:30-8:30 – Keynote panel

• 8:30-9 – Q&A and closing remarks

 

 

 

 

ANSYS version 15 and Matlab R2014a installed

ANSYS version 15 and Matlab version R2014a have been installed on PACE clusters.
To see examples of how to properly load and use the new versions, execute the following commands and follow the instructions provided.

$ module help ansys/15.0

$ module help matlab/r2014a

If you have any problems executing the examples given by “module help”, please contact pace-support@oit.gatech.edu

Mvapich2 2.0rc1 available in PACE repository

We have installed the most recent Mvapich2 stack (2.0rc1), which is available via module “mvapich2/2.0rc1”. Please see this changelog if you would like to know more about the improvements this version provides.

Also, please note that we have not started rebuilding any applications with this stack yet. If you think it will provide significant benefits for any existing application, please send us an email to pace-support@oit.gatech.edu and we will be happy to recompile that application for you.

Another quick note is that versions mvapich1.6 to mvapich1.8 are known to have performance problems, which are fixed with 1.8 (hint: search for “Georgia Institute of Technology” in the changelog).  We are still keeping them in the repository for backwards compatibility, but please refrain from using these old versions as you can.

Happy computing!

[RESOLVED] PACE clusters experiencing problems

We’ve identified the source of problems which impacted all of the clusters this (4/7) afternoon.  While making preparations to deploy some firewall upgrades for PACE, one of the campus network team members inadvertently applied a misconfiguration to one of our core network links.  This resulted in widespread packet loss across the PACE internal network.

The head nodes seem to have recovered properly, but please let us know if you see continued issues there.  While it is possible that jobs have been lost, we believe that most things will have recovered without loss.

We’ll continue to monitor the situation and address any remaining problems as soon as we are able.

PACE Team