Dell NVIDIA Linux Cluster Forge Retirement

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On September 28, 2012, NCSA's Dell/NVIDIA Cluster, Forge, will be decommissioned from current service after only one year of production service due to lack of ongoing support. Support for Forge over the past year has come primarily from NSF, but there are also allocations of resources supported by the University of Illinois campus, NCSA's Private Sector Program, and the NCSA Director's Office.

The batch queues on Forge will be set to drain by 5:00 PM on September 28, 2012. After this time, batch jobs that remain in the queues will not be executed. User access to the Forge login nodes will be available until September 30th to allow for data retrieval. Data remaining in the scratch, projects, and home directories after September 30th will be deleted. Please migrate any data you care about in a timely manner.

Those with allocations under NSF support (i.e. via the XSEDE allocations process) can have their allocation migrated to Keeneland, a new GPU cluster being deployed by a partnership between GaTech and NICS.  Keeneland is expected to be available for production use in July 2012. XSEDE allocations may be migrated to Keeneland any time between July and September 28. For more information on the hardware configuration of Keeneland, please see: http://keeneland.gatech.edu/. Additional information will be available here and on http://www.xsede.org soon.

If you require assistance in migrating your codes or data, please contact the NCSA Consulting Office at 217-244-1144 or by e-mail at consult@ncsa.illinois.edu. For allocations questions or questions about requesting a transfer, contact allocations@xsede.org. We will be processing questions and requests as quickly as possible and thank you in advance for your understanding.

Those with allocations under support by the University of Illinois or by the NCSA Director's Office will all expire by September 30, 2012. You are encouraged to consider investments in the Illinois Campus Cluster or to pursue an allocation from XSEDE.

The Illinois Campus Cluster Program is an ongoing service in support of shared computing resources for the campus. Investors are Illinois researchers and Illinois campus units who, individually or as a group, invest in shared computing resources as part of the Illinois Campus Cluster Program.  We expect that a primary interest will be access to GPUs.  The current cluster instance does not have GPUs, but we are currently planning the next cluster instance and GPUs are a likely component. If you are interested in this option you are encouraged to complete our Second Instance Interest and Needs Survey we currently have open at: https://campuscluster.illinois.edu/invest/2ndInstanceSurvey.html. For more information on the Campus Cluster, see: https://campuscluster.illinois.edu/.

XSEDE allocations can be applied for in order to obtain access to a variety of resources. Information regarding the application process is available at https://www.xsede.org/allocations and lists of computational, data and other resources is available at https://www.xsede.org/resources/overview.

Please do note that Forge's decommissioning in no way affects access to NCSA's iForge cluster for industrial HPC efforts. Those interested in making use of iForge as part of NCSA's Private Sector Program are encouraged to contact Evan Burness at eburness@ncsa.illinois.edu with any questions.

If you have questions or concerns, please contact John Towns, Director of Collaborative Cyberinfrastructure Programs, by phone at 217-244-3228 or by email at jtowns@ncsa.illinois.edu.