News


Here is all the latest news from the UCF ARCC:


Changes due to Summer 2022 Maintenance

The ARCC has completed the Summer maintenance cycle and Stokes and Newton are back in operation. Please remember that the ARCC brings both clusters down for one week, twice per year: once after Spring semester (this downtime) and once after fall semester.

Summary of Changes:

  • Slurm (job scheduler) upgraded to version 21.08.8-2
  • NVIDIA GPU Drivers on Newton upgraded to version 510.47.03
  • We have retired all 16-core Aspen nodes that were still in use. ec249 to ec296 have gone to a well-earned retirement after almost 12 years in use!
  • Thanks to the Jump Start Fund of President Cartwright's 2021-2022 Strategic Investment Program, we have installed 36 brand-new 48-core nodes (each with 256GB of RAM and 100Gbps HDR Infiniband) to Stokes! Known as ec113 to ec148, they are ready to serve the general-purpose computational needs of UCF researchers for many years to come.
    • Even after the retirement of the old nodes above, these new nodes increase the size of Stokes and now provide a total of 5,816 cores!
    • We also will still be adding 18 more nodes in the future once they ship and arrive.

ARCC to Hire Undergraduate Students

Greetings,

The Advanced Research Computing Center (ARCC) in research park is looking to hire undergraduate students to help with our high performance computing (HPC) resources. The student will help resolve problems for users, investigate issues related to the management and performance of our clusters, build & optimize software packages for the clusters, work to improve our documentation, and get hands-on experience with HPC specific hardware and software. Candidates should have experience with the GNU/Linux operating system, including scripting and standard methods for building software in UNIX-like environments. Special consideration will be given to students with experience running parallel and distributed programs, as well experience with scientific visualization tools.


For more information about the position, please contact Glenn Martin ( m...@ist.ucf.edu (Click on "..." to reveal the address)). For more information about the ARCC and its resources, please see our home page.


Thank You,
Glenn Martin
Jamie Schnaitter

Changes due to Fall 2021 Maintenance

Stokes and Newton have returned to operation! Please remember that we have two such scheduled maintenance downtimes per year, one after Fall term (the one we just completed) and one after Spring term.

Please take a moment to read over the changes:

  1. We upgraded the Infiniband network infrastructure to HDR (most nodes now run at 100 gigabits per second — up from 56 gigabits per second!). All new switches and all new cabling were installed within the past week!
  2. Due to hardware requirements and impending additions, we have retired some of our oldest nodes. ec297 to ec324 have gone to a well-earned retirement after serving ARCC users for 11 years!

We appreciate your patience and wish you the best with your research!

Fall 2021 UCF ARCC Maintenance Outage

UCF ARCC Maintenance Outage: Thursday, December 9 through Wednesday, December 15, 2021

Stokes and Newton will be taken down per our bi-annual routine maintenance cycle near the end of Summer term. Specifically, the clusters will be unavailable from Thursday, December 9 through Wednesday, December 15.

The primary objectives during this downtime is to install a new, faster high-speed Infiniband network.

Recall that we now routinely bring the system down twice a year, once in late Fall and once in late Spring/Summer. We will keep the users notified in advance of such downtimes, but we recommend you build such expectations into your workflow. Though we anticipate no data loss during this time, it's never a bad idea to backup your materials. So we suggest you use this opportunity to copy salient data and code off of Stokes and Newton prior to the downtime.

SLURM Jobs marked as “Requested Node not available, Reserved for maintenance”?

In preparation for the maintenance windows, the ARCC staff place a reservation on compute nodes starting at the beginning of the maintenance window. This ensures that jobs are not running when the staff need to begin the work to shut down the cluster. If you submit a job requesting more time than there is between the time the job is submitted and when the reservation begins, your job will stay in the queue with the status Requested Node not available, Reserved for maintenance. Jobs in this state will not start until after the maintenance window. If you believe your job can finish before the maintenance window, cancel the job and resubmit with a shorter time request. As with all resource requests, providing reasonable estimates to SLURM for run time will ensure the most efficient operation of the cluster.

About the UCF ARCC:
The University of Central Florida (UCF) Advanced Research Computing Center is managed by the Institute for Simulation and Training, with subsidies from the UCF Provost and Vice President for Research and Commercialization, for the use by all UCF faculty and their students. Collaboration with other universities and industry is also possible.
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Contact Info:
UCF Advanced Research Computing Center
3039 Technology Parkway, Suite 220
Orlando, FL 32826
P: 407-882-1147
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