RCSS Winter break hours / support update.

RCSS Users,

Given that the campus is closed over the break we will have reduced support during this time.  We will monitor support and the cluster over break but may not respond to your emails until we return on January 2nd.

As you may have noticed we have successfully moved to a ticketing system.  This has allowed us to better monitor and track issues to serve you better.  To this end please, help us serve you by following the points below for a better ticket:

  1. Please include a descriptive subject line so we can better track and respond to tickets.  It is difficult to remember what is going on with 20 tickets with the subject of “help.”
  1. Please only include one issue or related issues per ticket.  This allows us to follow this issue to completion.  Including multiple issues risks one of them getting lost.  Multiple emails/tickets is preferred.
  1. Please utilize the ticketing system and do not contact team members directly.  If you do this you risk having the issue lost or it not being responded to as people can get quite busy or be out for various reasons.  When you utilize the ticketing system the team can be immediately be aware of the issue and others can solve the problem when appropriate.  The ticketing system ensures that issues will be tracked to completion.
  1. Please provide adequate debugging information for technical issues.  Copy and paste (not a screen grab or picture of your monitor) the text in your console and include the command and the resulting output.  For job issues please include the job number(s), the jobfile, and the resulting slurm-*.out file.

By following these guidelines you can help us serve you faster and better.

The progress to the storage upgrade is going well.  We are only waiting on transferring about 100TB in /data to the new filesystem.  It takes a lot of time to move 100’s of TB’s and tens of millions of files.  Once the first pass is complete we will be able to give a better estimate on when the switch over will happen and will provide at least 2 weeks’ notice.

We will be upgrading /home to a dedicated all flash (SSD) storage system to make sure that accessing and editing your files on the login nodes is very fast and interactive.

The GPU’s on back-order have started shipping and we should be able to add 12 more GTX 1080 TI GPU’s to the system during the storage switchover.  We have also developed an GPU Investor service for groups that need more GPU resources.  Please contact rcss-support@missouri.edu for more information.

We are hiring more people to better serve you.  If you know of good people that would like to work with us please see our website for details (http://doit.missouri.edu/research).

Thanks once again for your support and have a happy break.

— Dec. 21, 2017