Transition to TeraGrid on NCSA SGI Altix

Overview
Impact for current NCSA (non TeraGrid) cobalt users
Useful Links

1. Overview

As announced in NCSA Access News (12.20.05), all NCSA HPC systems will be available as TeraGrid resources as of April 1, 2006. Ten percent of the NCSA SGI Altix (cobalt) has been available under TeraGrid since April 2005 - the system will be now be fully available as a TeraGrid resource, along with NCSA's IBM p690 (copper), Xeon Cluster (tungsten), and Condor Pool (radium).

2. Impact for current NCSA (non TeraGrid) cobalt users

2.1 Allocations and Accounting

Allocation Balance Change

All allocations that continue after April 1, 2006 will have their Service Unit (SU) balances transferred to a new TeraGrid version of the machine, and this new machine will have that balance as the new initial allocation, rounded up to the next thousand SU. Under TeraGrid, machine cobalt will be represented as tg_cobalt. The 3-letter NCSA project (PSN) will remain the same. This will be reflected in the NCSA usage command.

IMPORTANT NOTE: The transfer of balances will occur on Friday March 31, 2006. Users will see the new TeraGrid machine and balances in usage as their projects are processed during this time.

As a hypothetical example, Principal Investigator John Smith was awarded an allocation of 100,000 SUs on cobalt in January 2006, of which 27,820 SUs have been used. When the balances are transferred, the usage command will show:

$ usage -p xyz
Project_title: Simulations of Black Holes
Principal_Investigator: Smith, John

 Proj     Mach    Login   Usage  Status P_alloc P_usage P_expire Name 
  xyz   cobalt   jsmith  5301.38 Deleted 100000 27820.12 12/31/06 Smith, John
  xyz   cobalt    lahti  8173.31 Deleted 100000 27820.12 12/31/06 Lahti, Tracy 
  xyz   cobalt   hjiang 14345.43 Deleted 100000 27820.12 12/31/06 Jiang, Hong
  xyz tg_cobalt  jsmith     0.00  Active  73000     0.00 12/31/06 Smith, John  
  xyz tg_cobalt   lahti     0.00  Active  73000     0.00 12/31/06 Lahti, Tracy
  xyz tg_copper  hjiang     0.00  Active  73000     0.00 12/31/06 Jiang, Hong

Impact for current NCSA (non TeraGrid) cobalt users whose allocations are up for renewal April 1, 2006

All renewal allocations starting April 1, 2006 will be considered new TeraGrid allocations, which will include a courtesy login (referred to as a Roaming Allocation) on all TeraGrid systems for access to Data Resources in the TeraGrid.

Checking your Allocation Balances

The NCSA usage command will continue to be available for account and usage information on NCSA systems only. The TeraGrid usage command tgusage will list usage and account information for all TeraGrid systems.

2.2 Environment

The default environment on cobalt will remain the same. All existing software and functionality will remain intact. Access to the NCSA Mass Storage System (UniTree) will remain the same. So users will be able to continue computing on this system without any changes.

The TeraGrid hostname for the system is:

       login-co.ncsa.teragrid.org

The current NCSA hostname:

       co.ncsa.uiuc.edu

will continue to work.

2.3 User Support

The User Support structure remains the same. As before, please contact NCSA Support Services for NCSA-specific issues. For TeraGrid-wide or cross-system issues, please contact TeraGrid Support.

NCSA Consulting Services

NCSA Consulting Services provides software and applications support for users of NCSA's high-performance systems. To contact Consulting Services, send electronic mail to consult@ncsa.uiuc.edu anytime or phone (217) 244-1144 during the hours of 8:30 a.m. - 5 p.m. CT, Monday through Friday.

NCSA Helpdesk

The NCSA Helpdesk provides resolution to all system-related problems within the Center's computational environment. To reach the Helpdesk, send electronic mail to help@ncsa.uiuc.edu. In an emergency, telephone the Helpdesk at (217) 244-0709. Helpdesk email and phones are monitored 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

TeraGrid Support