HPC News Archives

This is an archive of old HPC news items. For more current news items.

Archived news items for 2020
Archived news items for 2019
Archived news items for 2018
Archived news items for 2017
Archived news items for 2016
Archived news items for 2015
Archived news items for 2014

Archived News for the year 2020

2020 July 15

DIT is pleased to offer a series of introductory workshops for new users of our clusters, especially those with limited HPC and/or Unix experience.

"Introduction to High Performance Computing", offered on July 28 and Aug 25;
"Introduction to Unix", offered on Aug 11, 2020 and Sep 8, 2020;
"Introduction to Compiling Software", offered on Sep 22, 2020;
"Introduction to Python", offered on Oct 6, 2020.

Please follow the links to the workshop pages for more information and links to registrations. The workshop series will be offered multiple times a year.

2020 June 24

Due to the overwhelming interest shown for the June 30 "Introduction to High Performance Computing" workshop, we have opened up to more dates: July 28 and Aug 25. Please see the main page for this workshop for more information and links to registration.

2020 June 10

DIT is pleased to announce our first ever "Introduction to High Performance Computing" Workshop to be held (on-line) on 10 June 2020. This is intended to introduce and orient new users of the Deepthought and Juggernaut clusters. More detail and registration information can be found on the main page for this workshop. We hope this will become a frequent offering.

2020 February 28

DIT is pleased to announce the addition of the OnDemand Web Portal for using the Deepthought2 and Juggernaut HPC clusters. It is hoped that this web portal will facilitate the use of the clusters by the UMD community, especially for those who are not comfortable with the Unix command line.

2020 January 13-16

Winter 2020 HPC Programming Bootcamp is to be held.

Archived News for the year 2019

2019 November 16-22: In November, 2019, the University of Maryland will once again hosted booth at the Supercomputing conference, SC19 in Denver, CO. For more information, see here.
2019 October 16: Deadline for early registration to SC19 conference.
2019 October 4: The University of Maryland and The Mathworks, Inc. are holding a half-day workshop on Parallel Computing with MATLAB. This workshop will cover parallel constructs in MATLAB as well as how to have MATLAB offload calculations to the Deepthought2 HPC cluster. The workshop is free, but registration is required and space is limited.
2019 September 16: Deadline for registering for Parallel Computing with MATLAB workshop (or when all available seats are taken).
2019 January 14-17: Winter 2019 HPC Programming Bootcamp is held.

Archived News for the year 2018

2018 December 10: Registration for the Winter 2019 HPC Programming Bootcamp scheduled for Mon Jan 14 to Thu Jan 17, 2019 is now open.
2018 Nov 5: UMD to Host Booth at SC18 - In November, 2018, the University of Maryland will once again host a booth at the Supercomputing conference, SC18 in Dallas, TX. For more information, see here.
2018 October 4: The cluster will be shutdown from 11 PM 4 Oct 2018 until about 6 AM 5 Oct 2018 in order to effect repairs to the automatic transfer switch in the data center.
2018 July 10: Registration for the 2018 HPC Programming Bootcamp has been closed, as all seats are full and there is a waiting list. We hope to offer this workshop again in January 2019.
2018 July 2: The available slots for the 2018 HPC Programming Bootcamp have been filled up. We will continue to accept a few more registrations for the waiting list.
2018 June 25: Registration for the 2018 HPC Programming Bootcamp scheduled for Aug 13 to 16, 2018 is now open.
2018 May 1: The original Deepthought cluster has been retired. Although it has served the UMD community long and well, the equipment is aging and can no longer be feasibly maintained with acceptable reliability.

Archived News for the year 2017

2017 Oct 1: UMD to Host Booth at SC17 - In November, 2017, the University of Maryland will host a booth at the Supercomputing 2017 conference in Denver, Colorado. For more information, see here.
2017 Apr 12: The Division of Information Technology (DIT) is making a small number of licenses for the PGI compiler suite available to members of the campus community. See the PGI help page for more information.
2016 February: Bill Burns is the new Director of Research Computing at the University of Maryland

Archived News for the year 2016

2016 Oct 31: UMD to Host Booth at SC16 - In November, 2016, the University of Maryland will host a booth at the Supercomputing 2016 conference in Salt Lake City, Utah. For more information, see here.
2016 March: Fritz McCall is the new Director of Research Computing at the University of Maryland

Archived News for the year 2015

2015 Dec 17

Sometime in or around January 2016, the MARCC staff plan to require two-factor authentication for access to the Bluecrab cluster. This will involve an app on your smart phone (the phone number you registered with MARCC on their form to request an account) which will generate an one-time passcode to be used in conjunction with your standard Bluecrab password. More information can be found at the MARCC web site.

2015 Jul 1

The Maryland Advanced Research Computing Center (aka MARCC) officially opens. The Bluecrab HPC cluster is available to UMD researchers via proposals to the AAC.

2015 Apr 16

Registration is now open for our annual HPC Boot Camp. This provides a rapid introduction to the complexities of High Performance Computing and parallel programming.

2015 Apr 13

Professor Derek Richardson of the Astronomy Department has taken over as the Chair of the University's HPCC Advisory and Allocations Committee, starting a one year term.

2015 Jan 26

Upgrades to original Deepthought cluster completed

The original Deepthought cluster has now been upgraded to version 6 of the Red Hat operating system. This is to make the two Deepthought clusters more alike to facilitate the manual migration of jobs from one cluster to the other.

The tap command has been disabled on the original Deepthought cluster (it was never supported on Deepthought2). It has been deprecated for some time now, and this change was made to bring the cluster environments into greater alignment. See Setting up your Environment and the page on setting up software environments. The latter also lists the available software and gives the translation between tap and module load tags.

Archived News for the year 2014

2014 Dec 11

Upcoming outages to the Deepthought clusters:

Starting at 7 a.m. on Monday, January 19, 2015 and ending by 5 p.m. on Friday, January 23, 2015, the Deepthought cluster will be taken out of service to upgrade it from RedHat 5 to RedHat 6. This upgrade will match the software installed on Deepthought to that installed on Deepthought2, which should enable a much easier transition back and forth between the two clusters. This update also will bring the Lustre filesystem up to date and allow the mounting of filesystems between the two clusters.
- During this outage, all queued jobs will be removed from queue and will need to be resubmitted once the cluster is returned to service.
Starting at 7 a.m. on Monday, December 29, 2014 and ending by 7 p.m. on the same day, there will be a complete outage of the Deepthought2 cluster. The purpose of this outage is to perform semi-annual patch installations and to upgrade to the latest Lustre filesystem software.
- As a result, we'll be holding job submissions so that jobs that would be running during the outage time frame will not be allowed to start. Once the cluster is returned to service, job processing will resume normally.

As always, please remember that the Lustre filesystems are NOT backed up and your critical data should be stored elsewhere. Please also remember that these filesystems are not to be used for long term storage of data, files older than six months are subject to automatic removal if necessary.

2014 Sep 11

XSede is sponsoring a regional outreach seminar at Johns Hopkins on September 11, 2014. For those that may want to utilize XSede Center resources in the future or obtain training from XSede in the future, this one day seminar may be useful. More information, an outline of topics, and details about registration (free, but registration required) can be found at http://idies.jhu.edu/talks-symposia

2014 Jun 30

Deepthought2 will be opened to general, production use starting July 1. Beta testers have been "kicking the tires" so to speak thoughout June. If your group has contributed resources to Deepthought2, please contact Fran Lopresti regarding the details of the setup of your allocation and the initial user list. Those applying for grants from the AAC will proceed as usual, and the AAC will decide which resource maps bests to the requirements of the proposal.

2014 May 27

Deepthought's scheduling software is being migrated to Slurm. The queue/partition scheme has also been simplified. Some documentation describing the differences is now available.

2014 May 14

Deepthought2 is HERE! We are configuring the systems, and should have some beta testers on it in early June. We are hoping to allow production use in July.