GAMING

As systems age, economics and Moore's Law eat away at their usefulness relative to newer systems. While we realize that decommissionings represent a serious inconvenience to many users, they are necessary for SCD to continue to provide world class computational resources to the NCAR research community. Newer systems are able to pack significantly more capacity and capability onto the SCD computer room floor under the constraints of available space, power, cooling, and annual maintenance costs. To make room for newer systems in the SCD machine room, the older systems must go. Thus, after four years of service to the NCAR community, blackforest and dave will be decommissioned on 10 January 2005. Blackforest and dave, IBM SP system Users may archive or transfer their data before 07:00 on 10 January 2005 when the systems administration staff will stop all user processes and take the machine into maintenance mode. They will then begin archiving the contents of blackforest's home directories. After the decommission, users will need to submit a request to the SCD consulting office to obtain their archived home directories. It is strongly recommended that users make their own backups of critical files so they are not inconvenienced by delays prior to the completion of the backups or afterwards. Note that blackforest's /ptmp directory will not be archived. If there are critical files on blackforest's /ptmp, the individual user is responsible for archiving them to the MSS or moving them to another machine. (Divisional filesystems are served from bluesky and will not be affected.) Computational work currently on blackforest can most easily be moved to the bluesky complex, with minor changes to the batch job scripts. Here are some relevant facts about bluesky: Bluesky's processors are roughly twice as fast as blackforest's Bluesky's nodes have 8 or 32 processors versus 4 or 16 on blackforest Bluesky's queue names are slightly different Bluesky documentation is provided at: http://www.scd.ucar.edu/computers/bluesky/ and http://www.scd.ucar.edu/docs/ibm/ Data analysis work currently on dave will need to be migrated to tempest, the new dataproc replacement. Tempest is an SGI Origin 3800 running the IRIX operating system. Users familiar with dataproc will find tempest familiar, however, dave batch job scripts will need to be rewritten for tempest since tempest's batch system is NQE, not LoadLeveler. Tempest documentation is provided at: http://www.scd.ucar.edu/computers/tempest/ As always, SCD's Technical Consulting Group is available to help you migrate your work from blackforest to another platform. Contact them at consult1@ucar.edu or 303-497-1311 if you need assistance.