Messages & Announcements

"Crane" will move from Beta to Production on Tuesday, Jan. 7. This transition will necessitate a brief outage that morning; it is anticipated it will be available later the same day.

Crane is roughly three times as powerful as Tusker, with most users to date reporting significant performance gains. We encourage all HCC users to set up and use DUO two-factor authentication asap. It is required now in order to be able to access Crane (see details via the following link), and will become required to access all HCC resources later this spring. Several tutorials will be held early this semester to assist users with this transition.

Happy New Year!
David Swanson
Director, HCC

Dear HCC account holder,

Our newest machine Crane is now open for "beta" usage -- there will be at least one planned downtime between now and Jan. 1, 2014, but the filesystems are not expected to be reformatted; i.e. data should be retained moving forward. Crane is 474 on the current Top500 list at 121.8 TeraFLOPS, and supports over 1.5 PetaBytes of disk (/work). We call this phase "beta" for several reasons:

<> there is expected to be a short downtime between now and Jan 1, 2014
<> several application programs need to be installed and some tools may need to be added
<> you must use Duo two-factor authorization to log in

If you do not yet have Duo set up for your HCC account, please see this page:
https://hcc-docs.unl.edu/display/HCCDOC/Setting+up+and+using+Duo
Your loginID and passwd will not change from other HCC machines; this is a second factor required for access to Crane.

Please note: To setup the Duo account initially, a user must stop by either HCC location (118 Schorr Center, UNL, or 152 Peter Kiewit Institute, UNO) in-person, or be reachable at a verified NU telephone number. This is due to the need to verify user identities going forward -- if this is for some reason not possible, please contact me and we will find a work around for you. Our intent is to protect the system, not to isolate it from legitimate use. (!)

We will be on Thanksgiving holiday until Monday morning; I realize it will not be possible for most of you to access Crane over the weekend. However, it clearly will not be utilized at all if we simply remain in a down state, and the filesystem overhaul was fast enough to now allow access to those who are ready. We will enable Duo access to all others as quickly as possible first thing next week. This was discussed in some detail at the HCC Symposium; details may be found at the URL listed above.

As always, please contact hcc-support@unl.edu if you have any difficulty with Crane. This is roughly 3 times the machine that Tusker is in several metrics -- we anticipate it will quickly become a preferred resource for many algorithms. One aspect where Tusker will continue to be preferred is for large shared memory set (RAM) programs -- Tusker has 256 GB/node, Crane 64 GB/node. In each case this is 4 GB/core -- but Tusker has 64 AMD "cores" while Crane has 16 Intel cores per node.

Best regards,
David

Maintenance is complete on SANDHILLS. Please resubmit any jobs and let us know of any troubles using the cluster by sending email to hcc-support@unl.edu