Important Announcements from the APAC National Facility
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 1.  The AlphaServer SC is to be decommissioned at noon June 23rd.

 The SC will stop running batch jobs at 9am on Thursday June 23rd.
 It will be unavailable to users after midday on the same day.  Since
 the SC will be physically disconnected from power and networks,
 there will be no further access.  If you have jobs running up to the
 end of service, you have only that 3 hour window in which to collect
 your final outputs.

 Your SC /home and /short files as at midnight on June 5th were
 copied to the AC.  You are responsible for all SC files created or
 modified after that time.  

 We will make a final backup of the SC system, but that backup will
 not be easily available to users and requests to recover files will
 be subject to delays.  (Please clean up both /short and /home
 directories to reduce the size of the back-ups required.)

  
 2.  Charging against accounts

 Time used on the SGI Altix AC will continue NOT to be charged against
 your grants until the start of the 3rd quarter at 0000hrs July 1.  Time
 used on the lc will continue to be charged for.

 Starting on July 1st, an hour of walltime on a cpu in the normal
 queue on AC will define a Service Unit (SU).  Service unit charging
 on LC will be one half the rate of AC, e.g. a job using 1 cpu hour
 in the LC normal queue will be charged 0.5 SUs.  As previousy advised,
 grants allocated for Q3 and Q4 will be scaled to reflect the
 change from the SC to AC systems.


 3.  Upgrade of AC

 The AC will be upgraded to 1680 processors over the next few weeks.
 We will attempt to minimize disruption to service during this time.


 4.  AC FAQ

 The following cover some common difficulties users have encountered
 so far:

   a. There is currently a restriction that jobs of > 8cpus must be
      a multiple of 8cpus.  We hope to lift this restriction soon.

   b. CPU requests for shared memory jobs (OpenMP, Gaussian, ...)
      must be of the form -lncpus=N:N to avoid the job being
      distributed over multiple nodes.

   c. If you compile with -ipo, you must also link with -ipo.

   d. MPI applications cannot be linked statically, there is no
      libmpi.a.

   e. In future, the copyq will not be stopped when MDSS is unavailable.
      Jobs accessing MDSS (using the mdss command) should request
      -lother=mdss to avoid being scheduled during an MDSS downtime.

 See the APAC NF User Guide http://nf.apac.edu.au/facilities/userguide/
 for more information.


 5. Login Difficulties

 If you cannot login to either the lc or the ac, contact us to get your
 password reset.  If you can login to the lc but not the ac, you most 
 likely need  to upgrade the version of ssh on your local machine.  

 Note that changing your password on either of the lc or the ac will
 effect the change on both systems.


 6.  Comments?
 
 If you have any comments on how you are finding the new AC system and
 suggested improvements, please let us know at help@nf.apac.edu.au.
   

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APAC National Facility
Leonard Huxley Building 56
Australian National University
Canberra  ACT  0200  Australia

URL:    http://nf.apac.edu.au/
Email:  help@nf.apac.edu.au              
Phone:  (02) 6125 3437, Fax:  (02) 6125 8199
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