[monolith-users] News digest, April 2004

[Lennart Karlsson]

Dear Monolith Users,

This is a digest of news items related to the usage of Monolith.
It is sent to all users on Monolith via the e-mail list
<monolith-users at nsc.liu.se>. Instructions on how to subscribe and
unsubscribe is listed at the end of this e-mail.


System Stability
=====================

Since my last letter, Monolith has been working nicely with only
minor problems. It looks like we have regained the good quality
we had before we moved Monolith to our new computer room.


Planned System Stops
=====================

Upgrading the Scali software, March 23-25, did not work out as
planned, so we are still running the old version. While testing
the new version on Monolith, a major software guru at the Scali
company found remaining instability problems and recommended us to
stay with the old version. Probably he will come back at a later stage,
with a wish to test some modifications on the new version, but just
now we are quite happy with the old version and we might perhaps
never make a permanent upgrade on Monolith.

Last Sunday Monolith and most other NSC systems were out of
service due to a planned, regular maintenance stop of the
electric power on our campus. This stop was too long for our
UPS batteries to cover it up.

As of now, we have not planned the next system stop.


Walltime limit of jobs
=====================

The walltime limit of jobs has been increased to 144 hours, i.e.
six days.


Updated projinfo command
========================

One more column is added to the 'projinfo' command output:
Your project's monthly allocation of CPU hours on Monolith.

You use the command without parameters,

	projinfo

and it prints the number of CPU hours your project has
already spent during the current month. It also lists
all members of the project that have been spending
CPU hours. Please note that your unfinished jobs are not
included in the CPU hour count.


Some plotting and data processing software
==========================================

These three tools for plotting and data processing are available on
the login nodes of Monolith:

Octave - A high-level language for numerical computations. (matlab like)
http://www.octave.org/
Command on Monolith: octave, /usr/bin/octave

Grace (ACE/gr, Xmgr) - Numerical Data Processing and Visualization Tool
http://plasma-gate.weizmann.ac.il/Grace/
Command to start GUI on Monolith: xmgrace, /usr/bin/xmgrace

Gnuplot - A portable command-line driven interactive plotting utility
http://www.gnuplot.info
Command on Monolith: gnuplot, /usr/bin/gnuplot



As always, please mail your questions and comments to
<support at nsc.liu.se>.

Happy computing!
-- Lennart Karlsson <support at nsc.liu.se>
   National Supercomputer Centre, Linkoping University
   http://www.nsc.liu.se