The Research Technologies (RT) division of UITS stands ready to continue their mission of supporting and advancing research at IU, the state of Indiana, the nation, and the world. Times like these bring out the best in both the technologists that work in RT and the researchers they serve. As they continue to strive to serve the research community, the high-performance computing and storage systems are fully available during this time. If you have a software request, a consulting question, or need advice on how best to utilize IU’s resources for your research workflow, you can reach out to them via email or the IU HPC Slack channel. In lieu of in-person meetings, they are happy to meet with you via Zoom as needed. They remain committed, as always, to serving the myriad of research endeavors across the University.
Big Red 3’s usage has continued to grow since it came online late last year. RT is planning to do a series of software updates in the next few months to move the system from the CLE6 operating system to CLE7. CLE7 has several advantages over CLE6, most notably a much newer underlying version of Linux (SLES15). Application software on Big Red 3 will also be upgraded or reinstalled to take advantage of the new operating system. This is a multi-step process and may be disruptive in the short term, but the system should be more stable and able to more easily support the latest research applications after these updates.
Big Red 200 is in its initial phase of software installation. Once that is complete HPE/Cray will finish the hardware verification process. RT will then move into acceptance testing, integration with other IU systems, early users, and full production in sequential order. A more precise timeline that includes a date for the availability of account creates, will be announced after the early milestones are achieved. Big Red 200 will leverage the next generation GPU architecture available from NVIDIA, which will be installed in a subsequent phase of the machine.
To provide additional GPU computing capacity the High Performance Systems (HPS) group in RT is currently working on the installation of a new GPU system that will be available to all HPC users this summer for general purpose GPU computing. This system, which will be part of Carbonate, is intended to support GPU computing while we wait for next generation GPUs to be installed in Big Red 200. If you are interested in being an early user of this system, contact the Research Applications and Deep Learning group. More details on the general availability of this system will be announced once the system is installed.
The Data Capacitor II (DC2) filesystem will be retired from service December 11, 2020. DC2 is being replaced by high-performance storage systems Slate and Slate-Project. RT will be adding scratch-only capacity later this year but it will be smaller than DC2 and exemptions to purge policies will not be permitted. Data should be removed or migrated to persistent storage on Slate or archived on the Scholarly Data Archive.
Request an account on Slate.
Request an account on Slate-Project.
Keep up-to-date about news from Research Technologies via the RT website at https://rt.iu.edu .
