Author: ssarajlic3

[Update — February 5, 2021, 2:14pm]

Dear PACE Users,

Our scheduled maintenance has completed on time. All Coda and Rich datacenter clusters are ready for research. As usual, we have released all users jobs that were held by the scheduler. We appreciate everyone’s patience as we worked through these maintenance activities.

Here is an update on the tasks, which includes a task that may require user action, please see below:

ITEMS THAT MAY REQUIRE USER ACTION:

• [COMPLETE] [Compute] Update provisioning resources for Hive cluster (login-hive[1-2], sched-hive, and globus-hive)

While updating login-hive[1-2], their SSH server keys changed. As a result, users may get a message that the key is not correct. If this should happen, please clear the entries from your local .ssh/known_hosts that have any reference to login-hive, login-hive1 or login-hive2, then try again.

ITEMS NOT REQUIRING USER ACTION:

• [COMPLETE] [Compute] Apply updates to all compute nodes
• [COMPLETE] [Compute] Reboot all compute nodes running Lustre clients
• [COMPLETE] [Network] Enable subnet managers for Hive
• [COMPLETE] [Network] Reboot the main Coda InfiniBand HDR switch
• [COMPLETE] [Network] Upgrade Cisco switches in the Coda datacenter to the latest supported code
• [COMPLETE] [Software] Upgrade Intel license server
• [COMPLETE] [Storage] Reconfigure Globus for the Phoenix cluster (i.e., globus-phoenix)
• [COMPLETE] [Storage] Upgrade Lustre clients
• [COMPLETE] [Storage] Upgrade controller and exascaler for the storage appliances: SFA200NV, SFA18KE
• [COMPLETE] [Coda Data Center] Georgia Power will install a Power Quality Monitor

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us at pace-support@oit.gatech.edu.

Happy Computing!

The PACE Team

[Update — February 2, 2021, 3:25pm]

This is a friendly reminder that our Maintenance will begin tomorrow at 6:00 AM and conclude on Friday, February 5^th, 2021.   As usual, jobs with long walltimes will be held by the scheduler to ensure that no active jobs will be running when systems are powered off.   These jobs will be released as soon as the maintenance activities are complete. Please note, during the maintenance period, users will not have access to Coda and Rich datacenter resources.

We have added one additional activity to this maintenance.  Here is a current list:

ITEMS NOT REQUIRING USER ACTION:

• [Compute] Apply updates to all compute nodes
• [Compute] Update provisioning resources for Hive cluster (login-hive[1-2], sched-hive, and globus-hive)
• [Compute] Reboot all compute nodes running Lustre clients
• [Network] Enable subnet managers for Hive
• [Network] Reboot the main Coda InfiniBand HDR  switch
• [Network] Upgrade Cisco switches in the Coda datacenter to the latest supported code
• [Software] Upgrade Intel license server
• [Storage] Reconfigure Globus for the Phoenix cluster (i.e., globus-phoenix)
• [Storage] Upgrade Lustre clients
• [Storage] Upgrade controller and exascaler for the storage appliances: SFA200NV, SFA18KE
• [Coda Data Center] Georgia Power will install a Power Quality Monitor

This maintenance is planned to last through Friday that will allow for Georgia Power to install a Power Quality Monitor, which is required to get the microgrid fully operational.  Due to work being performed by Databank on the colling systems, we agreed to do this activity on Friday.  No power outage is expected.   Once Georgia Power is complete with the installation, we will open the clusters to users.

If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact us at pace-support@oit.gatech.edu

[Original Note – January 20, 2021, 1:23pm]

Dear PACE Users,

We are preparing for our next PACE maintenance period, which will begin at 6:00 AM on February 3rd, 2021 and conclude at 11:59 PM on February 5th, 2021. As usual, jobs with long walltimes will be held by the scheduler to ensure that no active jobs will be running when systems are powered off. These jobs will be released as soon as the maintenance activities are complete.  Please note, during the maintenance period, users will not have access to Coda and Rich datacenter resources.

We are still finalizing planned activities for the maintenance period. Here is a current list:

ITEMS NOT REQUIRING USER ACTION:

• [Compute] Apply updates to all compute nodes
• [Compute] Update provisioning resources for Hive cluster (login-hive[1-2], sched-hive, and globus-hive)
• [Compute] Reboot all compute nodes running Lustre clients
• [Network] Enable subnet managers for Hive
• [Network] Reboot the main Coda InfiniBand HDR switch
• [Network] Upgrade Cisco switches in the Coda datacenter to the latest supported code
• [Software] Upgrade Intel license server
• [Storage] Reconfigure Globus for the Phoenix cluster (i.e., globus-phoenix)
• [Storage] Upgrade Lustre clients
• [Storage] Upgrade controller and exascaler for the storage appliances: SFA200NV, SFA18KE

If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact us at pace-support@oit.gatech.edu.

Best,

The PACE Team

Dear PACE users,

OIT will conduct an emergency firewall upgrade starting this evening, 01/14/2021, at 8:00pm to 10:00pm.   This upgrade is expected to impact VPN access, as a result, it is possible that connections in and out of PACE (e.g., interactive sessions, file transfers) may be interrupted during that period of time.

Who is impacted: During the emergency firewall upgrade window,  there is a possibility that PACE users may not be able to connect to PACE resources and/or they may lose connection briefly.  We encourage users to avoid running interactive jobs (e.g., VNC/X11) that rely on an active SSH connection to a PACE cluster during this time frame to avoid sudden interruptions due to a loss of connection to the PACE resources.  Batch jobs that are running and queued in the PACE schedulers will operate normally; however, any jobs that require resources outside of PACE or Internet will be subject to interruptions during this maintenance activity.  This maintenance activity will not affect any of the PACE storage systems.

What PACE will do:  PACE will remain on standby during this emergency firewall upgrade to monitor the systems, and report on any interruptions in service.   Up-to-date progress will be provided on Georgia Tech’s Status page, http://status.gatech.edu.

Thank you for your attention to this matter, and if you have any questions, please direct them to pace-support@oit.gatech.edu.

Best,
The PACE Team

[Update – January 5, 2020 11:30am]

Dear PACE users,

The routers that were upgraded late last night had a problem with OSPF, which caused the missing routes, and prevented connection to the system.  Users who may have tried to connect to PACE resources late last night would have received errors such as “no route to host” when attempting to ssh to headnodes.   Network Engineering has downgraded the firmware to the original version, and connectivity has been restored during the scheduled maintenance window.   PACE completed the testing by 2:19am this morning and confirmed that PACE services are operational.

Network Engineering team has engaged the vendor to identify the root cause of the issue given the firmware has been tested on same exact hardware prior to the deployment last night without any issues.   Once the root cause is identified and resolved, another upgrade will be scheduled and communicated accordingly.

Thank you for your attention to this matter, and if you have any questions, please direct them to pace-support@oit.gatech.edu.

Best,
The PACE Team

[Original Post – January 4, 2020 3:49pm]

Dear PACE users,

OIT’s Network Engineering Team will be conducting maintenance activities starting this evening, 01/04/2021, at 7:00pm through 2:00am (01/05/2021).   Data center routers and firewalls will get firmware upgrades.  All devices have redundancy, and devices will be upgraded one at a time.  No service disruptions are expected.   However, it is possible that connections in and out of PACE (e.g., interactive sessions, file transfers) may be interrupted during that period of time.

Who is impacted: During the maintenance window, we do not expect service disruptions at PACE; however,  there is a possibility that PACE users may not be able to connect to PACE resources and/or they may lose connection briefly.  We encourage users to avoid running interactive jobs (e.g., VNC/X11) that rely on an active SSH connection to a PACE cluster during this time frame to avoid sudden interruptions due to a loss of connection to the PACE resources. Batch jobs that are running and queued in the PACE schedulers will operate normally; however, any jobs that require resources outside of PACE or Internet will be subject to interruptions during this maintenance activity.  This maintenance activity will not affect any of the PACE storage systems.

What PACE will do:  PACE will remain on standby during this maintenance activities to monitor the systems, conduct testing and report on any interruptions in service.

Thank you for your attention to this matter, and if you have any questions, please direct them to pace-support@oit.gatech.edu.

Best,
The PACE Team

Dear Researchers,

Last week, we completed the migration of our third batch of users from Rich to Coda datacenter, which was a major milestone for our research community as we migrated nearly 2,000 active users from clusters in Rich to the Phoenix cluster in Coda.  Given the more than doubled number of users on already highly utilized Phoenix cluster coupled with the grace period that we have in effect for job accounting with respect to recent announcement about the new cost model, we have noticed a rapid increase in wait time per job by users on the cluster.   At this time, we are updating our scheduler policy to alleviate pressure on the wait time per job for users that should improve the overall quality of service.  The changes listed below are data-driven and have been carefully chosen so as to not adversely impact research teams that submit large scale jobs.

Effective today, the following changes have been made to the scheduler policy that effect the inferno and embers queues:

• Reduced the concurrent-use limit for CPU usage per research group from 7,200 processors to 6,000 processors.
• Reduced the concurrent-use limit for  GPU usage per user from 220 GPUs to 32 GPUs
• Added a per research group concurrent CPU hour capacity limit set to 300,000 CPU hours that allows the scheduler to permit the research group to concurrently run up to 300,000 CPU hours (i.e., requested processors * walltime)
• Added a per job CPU-time capacity limit set to 264,960 CPU hours that would allow, for example, a 2,208 core job to run for 5 days.

Jobs that violate these limits will be held in the queue until currently running jobs complete and the total number of utilized processors, GPUs, and/or the remaining CPU-time fall below the thresholds.   We have updated our documentation to reflect these changes, which you may view here.

Again, the changes listed above are taking effect today, December 14, 2020.   If you have any questions or concerns, please direct them to pace-support@oit.gatech.edu.

All the best,

The PACE Team

[Update – December 9, 2020 – 11:03am]

Thank you for your continued patience.   We are reaching out to update you that the scheduler has been resolved late last night, new jobs from users that were held in queue yesterday have resumed, and we have observed normal operation of the Phoenix scheduler through the night and this morning.  The cause of the scheduler issue was the large sudden influx of user jobs on December 7 as previously reported.  The updated timeout parameter will be kept in place to prevent a similar occurrence in the future.   Additionally, we are expanding our alert utilities to track additional metrics from the scheduler to alert us of similar stressors so that we may proactively address/mitigate scheduler issues.

The Phoenix cluster is ready for research.  Thank you again for your patience as we worked to address this issue in coordination with the vendor.

[Update – December 8, 2020 – 6:31pm]

[Original Note – December 8, 2020 – 10:26am]

Dear PACE users,

PACE is investigating a scheduler issue that is impacting the Phoenix cluster.  At this time, users are unable to run jobs, and  jobs are held in queue.  

This is an active situation, and we will follow up with updates as they become available.

Thank you for your attention to this urgent message, and we apologize for this inconvenience.

Dear PACE research community,

After we completed our second wave of user migration last week, we received some common questions from users in reference to the new cost model that was announced on September 29 and about the new cluster, Phoenix, in general, which we will address below for the benefit of the community:

• The Phoenix scheduler has been redesigned.   Unlike previous PACE-managed clusters, there are only two queues on the Phoenix cluster: inferno and embers.  To submit a job, you will need to specify a charge account (i.e., MAM account) that was/will be provided to you in the “welcome email” after migration to the Phoenix cluster in Coda.  You may have access to multiple MAM accounts, for example, a PI and their user group may have access to an Institute sponsored account (GT-gburdell3  – $68/mo), account for refreshed PI cluster (e.g., GT-gburdell3-CODA20 -> $43,011.32), or account for recent FY20 purchase (e.g., GT-gburdell3-FY20Phase2 -> $17,860.75).  For further details on submitting jobs on the Phoenix cluster, please refer to the documentation at  http://docs.pace.gatech.edu/phoenix_cluster/submit_jobs_phnx/ .
• Access to departmental PACE resources (e.g. CoC, CEE, biology,…) are restructured based on departmental preferences. As with the rest of PACE, access is now managed at a group level, each owned by a specific PI, although the distribution of available departmental credits may vary from one department to another.
• We are in a process of providing PIs further details with regards to their cluster(s) from Rich datacenter that were refreshed and converted into credits/MAM account according to the new cost model.  Additionally, PIs who participated in the FY20 purchases will receive further details about the conversion from purchased equipment to the credits/MAM account.
• As mentioned in our initial announcement on September 29, users will not be charged for their usage of compute resources until at least January 1, 2021.   Until that time, all jobs that run on Phoenix are free as we work to migrate all users into the cluster and for the users to get familiar with the new environment.  Please note that your credits will be declined, but we will reset your total before we start billing.
• All of your data has been migrated to Phoenix, but the structure has changed. Note that the data is now in your project storage under a different directory name, and the symbolic links to different locations have been broken due to this.  Please visit our documentation for information on locating your group’s shared directory and on recreating symbolic links as documented at http://docs.pace.gatech.edu/phoenix_cluster/where_is_my_rich_data/ .  For further details, please refer to the documentation at http://docs.pace.gatech.edu/phoenix_cluster/storage_phnx/ .
• pace-vnc-job command is functional, however, you will need to setup VNC for the Phoenix cluster.  To setup VNC, remove ~/.vnc directory, then run vncpasswd to set the new password for VNC on the Phoenix cluster.  After this, you will be able to submit pace-vnc-job with the additional MAM account that you will need to pass to the command.

If you have any questions, concerns or comments about your recent migration to Phoenix, upcoming migration or the new cost model, please direct them to pace-support@oit.gatech.edu.

Best,

The PACE Team

[Update – November 18, 10:08am] 

We are following up to inform you that the migration of pace-archive storage from Rich to BCDC datacenter has completed.  The service is fully operational.  You may now access your archived data via Globus PACE Phoenix endpoint if you have migrated to the Phoenix cluster, or PACE Internal endpoint if you are in Rich datacenter.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us at pace-support@oit.gatech.edu .

Thank you for your patience during this brief outage while migrated pace-archive.

[Update – November 17, 7:01am] 

At this time, the migration of pace-archive storage has started.  During the migration, you will not have access to the pace-archive. This migration is anticipated to last 1 day.  We will keep you posted on the progress of the archive storage migration, and you may check our blog post for further updates: http://blog.pace.gatech.edu/?p=6990

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us at pace-support@oit.gatech.edu.

Thank you for your attention to this notice.

[Update – November 16, 8:08pm] 

Dear PACE Users,

This is reminder that the migration of pace-archive storage will begin tomorrow as scheduled.   This migration is anticipated to last 1 day.  Please note, during the archive storage migration from Rich to BCDC, you will not have access to pace-archive.  Please make necessary arrangements in accessing your data prior to this scheduled outage so that the impact to your research is minimized.

What is happening:  Tomorrow, PACE users, will not be able to access pace-archive storage during the scheduled migration of the storage servers from Rich to BCDC datacenter.  PACE team is planning to restore access to archive storage by November 18, 2020.   During this outage, users will not be able to access their data, for example, use Globus pace-internal endpoint to access, retrieve, or upload their data from/into pace-archive.

Who does this message impact and what should you do: This outage impacts all PACE users who have access to the pace-archive storage.  Please  use this notice to plan accordingly in accessing your data around this scheduled outage so that the impact to your research is minimal.

What will PACE do: We will keep the users updated on the progress of the archive storage migration, and you may check back this blog post for further updates.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us at pace-support@oit.gatech.edu.

Thank you for your attention to this notice.

[Original Post – November 13, 7:20pm]

Dear PACE Users,

We are reaching out to inform you about the upcoming migration of pace-archive storage servers that’s scheduled for November 17.  The migration is anticipated to last 1 day.  During the archive storage migration from Rich to BCDC datacenter, you will not have access to pace-archive.  Please make necessary arrangements in accessing your data prior to this scheduled outage so that the impact to your research is minimized.

What is happening:  On November 17, 2020, PACE users, will not be able to access pace-archive storage during the scheduled migration of the storage servers from Rich to BCDC datacenter.  PACE team is planning to restore access to archive storage by November 18, 2020.   During this outage, users will not be able to access their data, for example, use Globus pace-internal endpoint to access, retrieve, or upload their data from/into pace-archive.

Who does this message impact and what should you do: This outage impacts all PACE users who have access to the pace-archive storage.  Please  use this notice to plan accordingly in accessing your data around this scheduled outage so that the impact to your research is minimal.

What will PACE do: We will keep the users updated on the progress of the archive storage migration, and you may check back this blog post for further updates.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us at pace-support@oit.gatech.edu.

Thank you for your attention to this notice.

Dear PACE Users,

In the past couple months, we have reached out to research groups with regards to the required user migrations from Rich to CODA datacenter.  At this time we are actively migrating users into CODA, and we have another migration of research groups scheduled for December 1^st.  In an abundance of caution, if you have not received an email about your migration to CODA datacenter, please contact PACE about your migration at your earliest convenience.

What is happening:  On December 1, the remaining PACE users (non-CUI) in the Rich datacenter will have their access disabled as part of the last migration to CODA datacenter that starts on December 1.  Please note, this does not apply to CUI resources and their user migrations at this time.

Who does this message impact, and what should I do:  If you are NOT already migrated to CODA, in the process of migrating to CODA, or received an email from PACE research scientist about your planned migration to CODA, then please contact pace-support@oit.gatech.edu so that we may address your migration and prevent interruption to your research as we disable access to Rich datacenter.

This message is being sent out of abundance of caution to ensure that no user is left behind in Rich datacenter as we disable access to all non-CUI resources in Rich datacenter on December 1, 2020.   If you have any questions or concerns, please direct them to pace-support@oit.gatech.edu.

Best,

The PACE Team