This blog is now closed. News is now posted on the UC HPC News blog and likewise the RSS feed.
On Thursday, May 7th, the following changes will be made to the loadleveler configuration:
- maximum wallclock time allowed on BlueFern facilities will change from 72 to 24 hours
- a high-priority queue will be created for entire-machine, 12-hour jobs
- reservations will only be creatable by administrators, at the request of a user
The GMT graphics package is now updated to the latest development version (approximately version 5.1.1) from 4.5.9 on the Linux cluster.
The Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) from Unidata is a Java-based software framework for analyzing and visualizing geoscience data.
Version 5.1 of IDV has been installed on the visualization cluster. It requires an openGL display and hence you must use vglrun idv to start IDV from a viz-tvnc session.
On Saturday afternoon there was unfortunately a GPFS outage that killed running jobs on the BlueGene/P and Visualization Cluster. If your HPC job terminated mysteriously on Saturday, some time after 3pm, this was the most likely reason. Our apologies for this interruption in service.
A security vulnerability has been discovered in many web browsers. See
http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/poodle-some-tips-for-turning-off-ssl-3-0/
for instructions on fixing this vulnerability in your web browser.
The visualization cluster was offline from midday yesterday, but is now functioning normally again. We regret any inconvenience caused to our users.
A system maintenance day is scheduled for October 15th. Two power7 nodes will be taken offline, and the GPFS filesystem may go offline due to maintenance work, which will kill HPC jobs. We regret any inconvenience to our users.
On July 30th, from 10am to 11am, we will be running maintenance on our systems. There should be no effect on users, but there is a slightly increased risk of an outage on the /hpc/* file systems.
Viz0 (only) now has vlc, which is an application that can play movies - useful for checking animations that you have created with paraview, for example.
On July 16th, from 9am to 5pm, we will be running maintenance on our systems. We will briefly shut down the login nodes, and it may be necessary to shut down the /hpc/* file systems at short notice - we apologize in advance for any disruption caused.
You may find your HPC jobs are not running because they are waiting on the reservations that are in place for Wednesday. You can still get jobs to run by submitting them with the wallclock time set to something that terminates before 9am Wednesday.
Update 10:45am: this maintenance is now finished.
There is a slight risk of a power outage on May 31, 8am - 12pm because of maintenance work on the data centre.
A brief outage of our network infrastructure took /hpc/scratch and /hpc/home offline for about 10 minutes. Unfortunately, all running HPC jobs were killed, so please check for crashes in your simulations. We regret the inconvenience this has caused our users.
After a hardware problem on Wednesday, the BlueGene/P controller has been restored and normal service has resumed. Some BlueGene jobs have been restarted but some will have been terminated - please check your output and log files. We regret the inconvenience this outage has caused users.
An important update from the REANNZ Video Conferencing Service team
We're getting in touch to let you know that we're doing an upgrade to our software. To continue using our service after this upgrade, you'll need to upgrade your desktop Scopia client software.
What do you need to do?
- The upgrade is happening on Saturday 29 March from 9am to 6pm - so, you'll need to upgrade your client after this and before you next join a VC meeting.
- To make the change - please go to http://sds.karen.net.nz and click on the link "click here to install these updates" and follow the simple instructions.
Mac users - you'll only be offered one option to download the "Scopia Desktop Client", so that's nice and easy.
PC users - you'll see that you have three check boxes - please select the "Conference Client/" option.
Mobile and VC room users - no need to make any changes, you won't be impacted by this upgrade. - Tip: After you've downloaded the new software - it's always best to test it and make sure it's all working ok. Remember, we have a test room that you can use. Just go to http://sds.karen.net.nz, type your username in, then "6222" into the meeting ID and click the "Participate Now" button.
- Please pass this on! We've contacted everyone in our community with an iview account (that's people who are able to set up VC meetings). If you know other people that use this VC service but don't set up meetings like you, please let them know that they also need to upgrade their client.
If you're having any issues or if you're unsure if this change affects you, please contact your organisation's video conferencing or desktop support. Of course, if you're not sure who helps within your organisation - please reply to this email and we'll point you in the right direction.
Thanks!
Biju,
REANNZ Help Desk Support