NCSA’s Forge to be decommissioned in September

On Sept. 28, 2012, NCSA’s Dell/NVIDIA cluster, Forge, will be decommissioned due to lack of ongoing support. Support for Forge has come primarily from the National Science Foundation, but there are also allocations supported by the University of Illinois, NCSA’s Private Sector Program, and the NCSA Director’s Office.

The batch queues on Forge will be set to drain by 5 pm Sept. 28. 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 Sept. 30 to allow for data retrieval. Data remaining in the scratch, projects, and home directories after Sept. 30 will be deleted.

Those with Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) allocations for Forge can have their allocation migrated to Keeneland, a new GPU cluster being deployed by a partnership between Georgia Tech and the National Institute for Computational Sciences. 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.

If you require assistance in migrating your codes or data, please contact the NCSA Consulting Office at 217-244-1144 or consult@ncsa.illinois.edu. For allocations questions or questions about requesting a transfer, contact allocations@xsede.org.

Allocations supported by the University of Illinois or the NCSA Director’s Office will expire by Sept. 30. Researchers with these allocations are encouraged to consider investing in the Illinois Campus Cluster or pursuing 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. If you are interested in this option please complete the interest and needs survey, which will guide future cluster deployments.

Forge’s decommissioning does not affect access to NCSA’s iForge cluster, which is design specifically for the needs of NCSA’s industrial partners. Those interested in using iForge as part of NCSA’s Private Sector Program are encouraged to contact Evan Burness at eburness@ncsa.illinois.edu.

If you have questions or concerns about Forge’s decommissioning, please contact John Towns at 217-244-3228 or jtowns@ncsa.illinois.edu.

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