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ITC Computer System Announcements

ITC Announcement/IBM SP Retirement

December 15, 2003

The IBM SP will be retired from service at the end of the fall semester, December 15, 2003. The IBM SP has reached the end of its life cycle. It is no longer cost-effective to keep such old hardware in reliable service to support your research.

Two years ago, the faculty Research Computing Task Force recommended that ITC begin acquiring new, state-of-the-art computing platforms to serve as replacements to the IBM SP. (See the Final Report of March 2001 posted at: http://www.itc.virginia.edu/rctf/.) ITC has done so over the last two years and the time has come to turn off the aged IBM SP.

The ITC Research Computing Support Group wants to insure that all users of the SP have migrated their code to newer High Performance Computing platforms well before December 15, 2003. There are several computing platforms to which you can migrate. These include two High Performance Computing Linux clusters, one with 64 nodes each with 1 GB of memory and 2 CPUs and one with 32 nodes each with 2 GB of memory and 2 CPUs. Details of these two clusters, including how to get started using them are available on the following Web pages:

http://www.itc.Virginia.EDU/research/linux-cluster/aspen/
http://www.itc.Virginia.EDU/research/linux-cluster/birch/

ITC has configured the IBM p640 Model B80 Symmetric Multi-Processor (SMP) that was running jobs in the LoadLeveler "huge" class as a node of the IBM SP cluster to serve as a separate IBM high performance computing platform. The SMP has four 450 MHz Power3 II Processors and 12 GB of total memory that is available to any processor. This system is now running AIX 5.1 as well as PBSPro, which the same batch queuing system used on ITC's Linux clusters.

The IBM SMP platform is intended as bridge system for those researchers whose local computational needs in software or compiler libraries are tied to AIX as well as those who need to run large memory jobs formerly run in the "huge" class on the SP. Rather than logging into 'splogin.sp2' users now connect to the front-end login node of "mplogin.itc" to use the IBM SMP. Information on how to submit jobs to the reconfigured IBM SMP high performance platform is available at:

http://www.itc.Virginia.EDU/research/ibm/smp

For some runs with less demanding memory requirements and no more than a one-hour CPU run time, the existing blue.unix AIX cluster may also be a suitable host system.

ITC's Research Computing Support group is available to assist you with this migration. We can help you determine the most appropriate platform for your computing work as well as answer questions or concerns during your migration. We encourage you to contact us by e-mailing us at Res-Consult@Virginia.EDU or calling the ITC Research Computing Support Center at 243-8800.

ITC/Research Computing Support Center

Posted 7/25/03; Updated 11/04/03