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SCITAS blog#

Helvetios: Back to production in degraded state!

The Helvetios cluster is now available again, but in a reduced and isolated configuration. Please read carefully the key changes and actions required.

Current Status

  • The cluster is back online with only 24 nodes currently provisioned.
  • Helvetios is no longer connected to the central storage, meaning:
  • /home, /scratch, and /work are now local to the cluster
  • The /work filesystem is no longer shared
  • All data previously stored in /scratch has been lost and cannot be recovered.

We plan to gradually increase the number of available nodes as soon as we confirm system stability.

Why These Changes?

  • Helvetios is based on unsupported, obsolete hardware, and SCITAS can only provide best-effort support for its maintenance.
  • Recent network issues on Helvetios have caused disruptions and performance degradation across all production clusters by impacting the central storage.
  • To protect the integrity of the production environment, we had to isolate Helvetios from shared storage.

What You Need to Do

  • Manually copy your SSH keys
  • Data previously stored in /home or /work (when it was part of the central storage) will need to be restored manually.

We understand this situation may cause inconvenience, and we appreciate your patience as we continue to maintain access to this legacy system under challenging conditions.

Happy computing! 😊🚀

Kuma Cluster Full Production & Pricing – Nov 1st

We are excited to announce the successful completion of the beta testing phase for the Kuma GPU cluster, and we are preparing to enter full production starting from November 1st, 2024. Your participation in the beta phase has been invaluable, with a total of approximately 450,000 GPU hours of calculation jobs executed. This extensive testing allowed us to identify and resolve various hardware and software issues, ensuring that Kuma is largely ready for production.

Kuma Beta Opening

After a successful restricted beta with more than 80'000 jobs submitted, we are pleased to announce that Kuma, the new GPU-based cluster, is available for testing starting now! This marks an important milestone as we transition from the Izar cluster, which will soon be reassigned to educational purposes, to the much more powerful Kuma cluster. You can now connect to the login node at kuma.hpc.epfl.ch to begin testing your codes.

New Archiving Service Now Available

We are happy to announce the launch of our new archiving service, designed to provide long-term low-cost storage for your research data.

Accessible from the frontend nodes of our Izar and Jed clusters, this service utilizes a reliable magnetic tape system to ensure your data is preserved for a minimum of 10 years.

Annual SCITAS maintenance

This communication is of significant importance and may affect your work. We strongly recommend dedicating time to thoroughly read its content.

We are approaching our forthcoming annual maintenance period, scheduled from February 5 to February 19, 2024. This maintenance is essential for enhancing our services and includes the following key upgrades:

End of year retrospective

As 2023 comes to an end, we wanted to share with you this short message summarizing this (almost) past year. From the computational point of view, 2023 was outstanding! The service was used by 1200 unique users coming from 135 labs. Around 131 million core-hours and 236'000 GPU-hours were used on the machines. Among them, 7.2 million core-hours and 19'000 GPU-hours were dedicated to students and the 19 courses that used our infrastructures.