25-Mar-2019

New Computer Shortage

In our 25-Feb-2019 newsletter, we noted that availability of new computers is being affected by a widely-reported shortage of Intel CPUs. Currently, all of our standard computer models are backordered with our suppliers. Until this shortage is resolved, our remaining stock of new computers will be reserved for time-sensitive deployments. Non-urgent requests for new computers will be put on hold. Thank you for your understanding.

CLASSE Compute Farm Update

We recently upgraded the CLASSE Compute Farm queueing system server software to SGE 8.1.9, allowing for much improved configuration and allocation of resources. We also restored two 24-core nodes that had been pulled to replace two failed nodes in the CLASSE cluster. Some notes to keep in mind:

• Many of the Farm nodes are designated as hot spares for the CLASSE, CESR, and CHESS high-availability clusters, and thus will be removed as needed.
• If you wish to improve your access to Farm resources, please consider purchasing dedicated nodes, which we will configure to give your jobs high priority access.
• Because all Farm nodes are now 64-bit, please remove "-l arch=linux-x64" from your job scripts. This option is no longer required and will actually prevent your job from running.
• Some Farm disruptions may occur as we tune the queueing system configuration to take adavantage of the new features in SGE 8.1.9.

For more information, please see our CLASSE Compute Farm and Linux wiki pages:

• https://wiki.classe.cornell.edu/Computing/ComputeFarmIntro
• https://wiki.classe.cornell.edu/Computing/GridEngine
• https://wiki.classe.cornell.edu/Computing/LinuxIntroduction

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General network and server maintenance will occur every Tuesday from 12:00 noon to 2:00 PM. The CLASSE-IT group will always announce any expected disruptions in our NewsLetter and via CLASSE-IT-NEWS-L, but with the size and complexity of our network there is always the potential for something to go wrong. We will do our best to contain all network maintenance and planned outages to Tuesdays from 12:00 noon to 2:00 PM.

Unless other arrangements have been made, CLASSE-managed Windows systems may be updated and rebooted on Tuesday morning at 2:00 AM, so please avoid critical or lengthy operations at that time. For more details, please see SystemExpectations.

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Questions or problems? Submit a service request.

Other resources:

• CLASSE IT Home Page
• Previous newsletters

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