[Triolith-users] Triolith pilot test ends on Sunday 2012-08-26

[Mats Kronberg]

Dear Triolith users,

The Triolith pilot test has now been running for almost eight weeks.

Overall, we believe that the system is working well. The scheduling
problem that mostly affected large jobs (that some of you might have
noticed) should be solved now.

If you have any feedback regarding the test (e.g benchmark results or
some comments on what works well and what does not) we would like to
hear from you. Please send any such reports to support at nsc.liu.se.

If you have any tests that you had planned to run during this pilot
test but have not been able to do (e.g due to long queue times), and
that you think would be useful to others (e.g scaling tests) please
email support at nsc.liu.se and explain the situation. If your test is
deemed interesting enough, we can make sure that it runs before the
pilot test ends.

The pilot test will officially end on Sunday (2012-08-26). Jobs
started before this date will be allowed to finish. When the pilot
test ends, two things will change:

1: NSC will consider the system to be in normal production. This means
that we consider it to be stable enough for normal production jobs,
that we will be extra careful when making changes, and that we will
not kill jobs, restart servers etc without warning unless it's
absolutely necessary.

2: The pilot test project liu-2012-00060-20 will lose its computing
time allocation on Triolith, so a user who are not a member of a
"normal" SNIC project with time allocated on Triolith will no longer
be able to run jobs.

If the command "projinfo" on Triolith only lists the project
"liu-2012-00060-20" when you run it you only have access to the pilot
test project and you will not be able to start any more jobs when the
pilot test has ended. If you want to continue using Triolith you need
to apply for membership in an existing project with time allocated on
Triolith.

Projects already granted Medium Scale SNIC time on Neolith will have
to move to Triolith during the autumn. This is in order to start the
decommissioning of Neolith and allow the installation of Triolith
phase two. Those projects will be allocated time on Triolith from next
Monday (2012-08-27) until the end of their duration.

NSC will unfortunately not be able to grant any new projects time on
Triolith until phase two is in production, which we believe will be in
November. Then it will be possible to apply for time on Triolith in
the usual way, see https://www.nsc.liu.se/start/apply/ for details.

However, please send an email to support at nsc.liu.se if you would like
to be a member in a small project to migrate your work to Triolith, do
development work or limited testing prior to phase two of Triolith is
in production. Describe what you would like to do, the purpose of the
work, which code to use, cases to run, etc. This possibility is not
meant for any kind of production.

Also, if you would like to run tests on the full system (up to 1200
nodes/19200 cores), there will be a limited opportunity to do this,
probably during October or November. There will not be a pilot test
period like this one for the full system, but NSC might accept a
limited number of very large (up to 1200 nodes/19200 cores) test jobs
if they are deemed interesting enough (by NSC). To use this
opportunity, please contact support at nsc.liu.se and describe what you
would like to run (what code, how many cores are needed, for how long,
why it is interesting, etc), and we will consider running it during
one of the periods when we will run tests on the whole system.

NSCs normal account policy for academic systems apply to Triolith: If
you are not a member of an active project your accounts will remain
open for 6 months, but you can only use it to login to the login node
(e.g to transfer files). If you do not become a member of another
active project within 6 months your account will be closed.


Best Regards,
NSC