Les Michelson
Wednesday, June 3, 2020 at 11:46 am

Former HPCC Owners and Associated Users

The job partitions and ownership configurations associated with the legacy HPCC system will be removed after June 30. We have kept those resources in-place as long as we could and much longer than planned. The reasons for doing this are manifold. The compute resources integrated into Amarel from HPCC are far out of warranty and that old equipment is not reliable. In addition, power consumption is more efficient in newer nodes than in the old HPCC node. We also must liberate space, power and cooling to accomodate new equipment.

HPCC owner storage: current storage allocations will expire October 31, 2020. Storage up to the amount currently owned may be purchased if HPCC PIs wish to retain those storage allocations beyond October 31. Those purchases would be standard Amarel storage purchases at $150/TB for a 4-year term ownership (with that 4 yr ownership starting November 1, 2020). Please contact Kristen Lepping (klepping@rutgers.edu) if you are interested in retaining your storage beyond the October 31 expiration. If so, we ask that you notify us as soon as you can as this information will aid us in our longer term storage planning.

What does this mean for your future use of Amarel?

On July 1, 2020 HPCC accounts will be treated as Open Access subject to pre-emption; i.e., jobs submitted by these accounts may be terminated if insufficient resources are available to satisfy owner entitlement for their own jobs. The non-pre-emptible partition is an available option if your jobs are unable to tolerate pre-emption. As noted earlier, your /home and /scratch directories will be retained and project storage can be renewed if desired before their 11/31/20 expiration. In summary, your jobs on Amarel will continue to run as Open Access, but without the guaranty of a resource dedicated to your account. Please email help@oarc.rutgers.edu if you have any questions regarding the upcoming retirement of HPCC owner resources.

We also invite you to consider the purchase of new nodes to replace your former HPCC asset. OARC has announced its Phase IV ownership opportunity with availability by mid to late Summer 2020. These nodes are far more powerful and energy efficient than the nodes comprising HPCC and will be supported for four years from date of initial owner access.

https://oarc.rutgers.edu/resources/amarel/#ownership

Thank you for your HPCC ownership and the impact it has had on the vibrant HPC capability and community it helped to foster over the last several years. Again, do not hesitate to contact us should you have questions regarding Amarel Open Access or new storage and dedicated compute acquisition. We hope you will consider Phase IV ownership.

Warm regards,
Leslie P. Michelson, Ph.D.
Senior Director