The Rich data center uninterrupted power system (UPS) will undergo maintenance to replace failed batteries on 11-January, starting at 8.00am. Due to the power configuration, it’s not expected for any of the systems in Rich to lose power during this time. All PACE services should function normally.
Please contact pace-support@oit.gatech.edu if you need more details.
After the deployment of Hive cluster this Fall, we are pleased with the rapid growth of our user community on this cluster along with the utilization of the cluster that has been rapidly increasing. During this period, we have received user feedback that compels us to make changes that will further increase productivity for all users of Hive. Hive PIs have approved the following changes listed below that were deployed on January 9:
Who is impacted:
User Action:
Additionally:
We would like to remind you of the upcoming Hive cluster outage due to the creation of a Micro Grid power generation facility. At 8 AM on Monday, January 20th (Georgia Tech holiday for MLK day), the Hive cluster will be shutdown for an anticipated 24 hours. A reservation has been put in place on all Hive nodes during this period, and any user jobs submitted that will overlap with this outage will be provided with a warning indicating this detail, and enqueued until after completion of work. A similar warning will be generated for jobs overlapping with the upcoming cluster maintenance on February 27.
The planned outage of the CODA data center has been re-scheduled, and so the Hive cluster will be available until the next PACE maintenance period on February 27. The reservation has been removed, so work should proceed on January 20 as usual.
Our documentation has been updated to reflect these changes and queue additions, and can be found at http://docs.pace.gatech.edu/hive/gettingStarted/. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us at pace-support@oit.gatech.edu.
We would like to let you know about upcoming upgrades to Georgia Tech’s VPNs. The VPN software will be updated by OIT to introduce a number of bug fixes and security improvements, including support for macOS 10.15 as well as Windows 10 ARM64 based devices. After the upgrade, your local VPN client will automatically download and install an update upon your next connection attempt. Please allow the software to update, then continue with your connection on the upgraded interface.
The main campus “anyc” VPN, which is used to access PACE from off-campus locations, will be upgraded on January 28. The “pace” VPN, which is used to access our ITAR/CUI clusters from any location, will be upgraded on January 21.
If you wish to try the new client sooner, you may do so by connecting to the dev.vpn.gatech.edu VPN, which will prompt download of the upgraded client. Due to capacity limitations, please disconnect after update and return to using your normal VPN service.
For ongoing updates, please visit the OIT status announcements for the pace VPN or the anyc VPN.
As always, please contact us at pace-support@oit.gatech.edu with any concerns.
Good Afternoon Researchers!
We are pleased to announce two new tools to improve interactive job experiences on the PACE clusters: pace-jupyter-notebook and pace-vnc-job!
Jupyter Notebooks are invaluable interactive programming tools that consolidate source code, visualizations, and formatted documentation into a single interface. These notebooks run in a web browser, and Jupyter provides support for many languages by allowing user to switch between desired programing kernels, such as Python, MATLAB, R, Julia, C, Fortran, just to name a few. In addition to providing an interactive environment for development and debugging code, Jupyter Notebooks are an ideal tool for teaching and demonstrating code and results, which PACE has utilized for its recent workshops.
The new utility pace-jupyter-notebook provides an easy to run command for launching Jupyter notebook from the following login nodes/clusters (login-s[X], login-d[x], login7-d[x], testflight-login, zohar, gryphon, login-hive[X], pace-ice, coc-ice…) that will enable Jupyter on your workstation/laptop browser of your choice. To launch Jupyter, simply login to PACE, and run the command pace-jupyter-notebook -q <QUEUENAME>, where <QUEUENAME> should be replaced with the queue in which you wish to run your job. Once the job starts, follow the three-step prompt to connect to your Jupyter Notebook! Full documentation on the use of pace-jupyter-notebook, including available options to change such as job walltime, processors, memory, and etc., can be found at http://docs.pace.gatech.edu/interactiveJobs/jupyterInt/. Please note that on busy queues, you may experience longer wait times to launch the notebook.
In addition, we are providing a similar utility for running software with graphical user interfaces (GUIs), such as MATLAB, Paraview, ANSYS, and many more) on PACE clusters. VNC sessions offer a more robust experience when compared to traditional X11 forwarding. With a local VNC Viewer client, you can connect to the remote desktop on a compute node and interact with the software as if running on your local machine. Similar to the Jupyter Notebook utility, the new utility pace-vnc-job provides an easy to run command for launching VNC session on a compute node and connecting your client to the session. To launch a VNC session, login to PACE, and run the command pace-vnc-job -q <QUEUENAME>, where <QUEUENAME> should be replaced with the queue in which you wish to run your job. Once the job starts, follow the three-step prompt to connect your VNC Viewer to the remote session, start up the software you wish to run. Full documentation on the use of pace-vnc-job, including available options to change such as job walltime, processors, memory, and etc.,, can be found at http://docs.pace.gatech.edu/interactiveJobs/setupVNC_Session/. Again, please note that on busy queues, you may experience longer wait times to launch a VNC session.
Happy Interactive computing!
Best,
The PACE Team
[Update 11/5/19]
We would like to remind you that PACE’s maintenance period begins tomorrow. This quarterly maintenance period is planned for three days and will start on Thursday, November 7, and go through Saturday, November 9. 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.
These activities will be performed:
ITEM REQUIRING USER ACTION:
– Anaconda Distributions have started to use a year.month scheme, starting from late last year (https://www.anaconda.com/anaconda-distribution-2018-12-released/). This is easier for all users of PACE to track; accordingly, all PACE resources will now adopt the same convention in the use of anaconda2/2019.10 and anaconda3/2019.10 modules across all PACE resources. Defaults for Anaconda will now be set to the latest YYYY.MM. Therefore, the anaconda module files for “latest” will be removed, to avoid ambiguities. However, software installations that rely on “latest” will still be retained to preserve any critical user workflows. Users currently loading an Anaconda module ending in “latest” should modify their commands to reference a specific version of Anaconda (or just load the default without a version specified – e.g., “module load anaconda3”). Please email PACE Support if you need help in accessing older versions of Anaconda that are no longer available via the modules system or in updating your scripts.
ITEMS NOT REQUIRING USER ACTION:
– (Completed) Scheduler settings will be modified to improve the scheduler’s ability to handle large numbers of job submissions rapidly. These changes, along with the new policy implemented last week (10/29/19) limiting simultaneous job submissions (http://blog.pace.gatech.edu/?p=6550), will help stabilize the shared scheduler (accessed via login-s[X] headnodes) and make it more reliable. These scheduler settings are already implemented on the Hive cluster.
– (Completed) PBSTools, which records user job submissions, will be upgraded.
– (Completed) Upgrades to routers and network connections for PACE in Rich and Hive in Coda will be made in order to improve high-speed data transfer.
– (Completed) [Hive cluster] Infiniband switch firmware will be upgraded.
– (Completed) [Hive cluster] Storage system firmware will be updated.
– (Completed) [Hive cluster] Subnet managers will be reconfigured for better redundancy.
– (Completed) [Hive cluster] Lmod, the environment module system, will be updated to a newer version.
– (Completed) The athena-6 queue will be upgraded to RHEL7.
If you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to contact us at pace-support@oit.gatech.edu . You can follow our Maintenance blog post at http://blog.pace.gatech.edu/?p=6614.
[Update 11/1/19]
We would like to remind you that we are preparing for PACE’s next quarterly maintenance days on November 7-9, 2019. This maintenance period is planned for three days and will start on Thursday, November 7, and go through Saturday, November 9. 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.
We are still finalizing planned activities for the maintenance period. Here is a current list:
ITEM REQUIRING USER ACTION:
– Anaconda Distributions have started to use a year.month scheme, starting from late last year (https://www.anaconda.com/anaconda-distribution-2018-12-released/). This is easier for all users of PACE to track; accordingly, all PACE resources will now adopt the same convention in the use of anaconda2/2019.10 and anaconda3/2019.10 modules across all PACE resources. Defaults for Anaconda will now be set to the latest YYYY.MM. Therefore, the anaconda module files for “latest” will be removed, to avoid ambiguities. However, software installations that rely on “latest” will still be retained to preserve any critical user workflows. Users currently loading an Anaconda module ending in “latest” should modify their commands to reference a specific version of Anaconda (or just load the default without a version specified – e.g., “module load anaconda3”). Please email PACE Support if you need help in accessing older versions of Anaconda that are no longer available via the modules system or in updating your scripts.
ITEMS NOT REQUIRING USER ACTION:
– Scheduler settings will be modified to improve the scheduler’s ability to handle large numbers of job submissions rapidly. These changes, along with the new policy being implemented on Tuesday (10/29/19) limiting simultaneous job submissions (http://blog.pace.gatech.edu/?p=6550), will help stabilize the shared scheduler (accessed via login-s[X] headnodes) and make it more reliable. These scheduler settings are already implemented on the Hive cluster.
– RHEL7 clusters will receive critical patches.
– Updates will be made to PACE databases and configurations.
– PBSTools, which records user job submissions, will be upgraded.
– Upgrades to routers and network connections for PACE in Rich and Hive in Coda will be made in order to improve high-speed data transfer.
– [Hive cluster] Infiniband switch firmware will be upgraded.
– [Hive cluster] Storage system software will be updated. – [Hive cluster] Subnet managers will be reconfigured for better redundancy.
– [Hive cluster] Lmod, the environment module system, will be updated to a newer version.
If you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to contact us at pace-support@oit.gatech.edu . You can follow our Maintenance blog post at http://blog.pace.gatech.edu/?p=6614.
[Original post]
We are preparing for PACE’s next maintenance days on November 7-9, 2019. This maintenance period is planned for three days and will start on Thursday, November 7, and go through Saturday, November 9. 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.
We are still finalizing planned activities for the maintenance period. Here is a current list:
ITEM REQUIRING USER ACTION:
– Anaconda Distributions have started to use a year.month scheme, starting from late last year. This is easier for all users of PACE to track; accordingly, all PACE resources will now adopt the same convention in the use of anaconda2/2019.10 and anaconda3/2019.10 modules across all PACE resources. Defaults for Anaconda will now be set to the latest YYYY.MM. Therefore, the anaconda module files for “latest” will be removed, to avoid ambiguities. However, software installations that rely on “latest” will still be retained to preserve any critical user workflows. Users currently loading an Anaconda module ending in “latest” should modify their commands to reference a specific version of Anaconda (or just load the default without a version specified – e.g., “module load anaconda3”). Please email PACE Support if you need help in accessing older versions of Anaconda that are no longer available via the modules system or in updating your scripts.
ITEMS NOT REQUIRING USER ACTION:
– Scheduler settings will be modified to improve the scheduler’s ability to handle large numbers of job submissions rapidly. These changes, along with the new policy being implemented on Tuesday (10/29/19) limiting simultaneous job submissions, will help stabilize the shared scheduler (accessed via login-s[X] headnodes) and make it more reliable. These scheduler settings are already implemented on the Hive cluster.
– RHEL7 clusters will receive critical patches.
– Updates will be made to PACE databases and configurations.
– Firmware for DDN storage will be updated.
– Upgrades to routers and network connections for PACE in Rich and Hive in Coda will be made in order to improve high-speed data transfer.
– [Hive cluster] Infiniband switch firmware will be upgraded.
– [Hive cluster] Subnet managers will be reconfigured for better redundancy.
– [Hive cluster] Lmod, the environment module system, will be updated to a newer version.
If you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to contact us at pace-support@oit.gatech.edu.
This is a friendly reminder that our updated policy impacting Shared Clusters at PACE will take effect on October 29, 2019.
On October 29, 2019, we are reducing the limit of number of queued/running jobs per user to 500.
Who is impacted? All researchers connecting to PACE resources via login-s[X].pace.gatech.edu headnode are impacted by this policy change (also, we have provided a list of impacted queues below). We have identified all the researchers/users who are impacted by these changes, who were contacted on multiple occasions. We have worked with a number of researchers from different PI groups during our consulting sessions in helping them adopt their workflows to the new max job per users limit. PACE provides and supports multiple solutions, such as, job arrays, GNU parallel and Launcher that are in place to help users quickly adapt their workflows to this policy update.
Prior to this policy change taking effect on October 29, we have one more consulting session that’s scheduled on:
For details about our policy change , please visit our blog post.
Again, the changes listed above will take effect on October 29, 2019. After October 29, users will not be able to submit more than 500 jobs.
If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact us at pace-support@oit.gatech.edu
OIT will be performing an Annual Preventative Maintenance for UPS units for Rich Data Center on Saturday, October 12, from 7:00AM – about 5:00PM. No outage is expected from this work; however, in the case of an outage, PACE clusters and jobs running on them are at the risk of being interrupted. Again, it is unlikely that we will have a power outage during this maintenance period.
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us at pace-support@oit.gatech.edu.
This morning we noticed that the Hive nodes were all marked offline. After a short investigation, it was discovered that there was an issue with configuration management, which we have since corrected. Ultimately, the impact from this should be negligible, as jobs that were running continued accordingly, while queued jobs were simply held until resources became available. After our correction, these jobs started as expected. Nonetheless, we want to ensure that the Hive cluster provides performance and reliability as expected, so if you find any problems in your workflow due to this minor hiccup, or for any problems you encounter moving forward, please do not hesitate to send an email to pace-support@oit.gatech.edu.
PACE is excited to announce that distributed MATLAB use is now available on PACE resources. Georgia Tech’s new license allows for unlimited scaling of MATLAB on clusters. This change means that users can now run parallelized MATLAB code across multiple nodes. For detailed instructions, please visit our distributed MATLAB documentation at docs.pace.gatech.edu/software/matlab-distributed/.
Beginning tomorrow morning (9/18/19), there will be urgent maintenance on the cooling system in the Rich data center, which houses all PACE clusters except for Hive. A temporary cooling unit has been installed, but should the secondary cooling unit fail, the room will begin to heat.
Please follow updates on this maintenance and find a full list of affected services across campus at https://status.gatech.edu/pages/maintenance/5be9af0e5638b904c2030699/5d7fd6219012a0316b71ef83.
– PACE team