Hello and Season's Greetings!

Below are a list of brief announcements related to ARC systems and services. Most have links you can follow for more details on the topic.

New GPU resources available on Tinkercliffs:
The Tinkercliffs cluster now has 10 additional nodes, each equipped with 8 NVidia A100-80GB GPU accelerators. These resources are open to all via the dgx_normal_q and dgx_dev_q.

Maintenance Outage:
All ARC systems will be offline and inaccessible January 17-19th, 2023 (first week of classes in Spring 2023 semester) for regular maintenance. Jobs which cannot complete before the start of the maintenance period will be held in queue during the maintenance and scheduling will resume immediate after the outage is completed.

-!-Emergency Outage for VT-Archive-!-
Some component failures on the system which runs the /vtarchive file systems are forcing an emergency outage of that filesystem starting tomorrow (Friday, Dec. 16). We do not know the expected duration yet, but will work to get it stablized and back online quickly.

Cascades and Dragonstooth Decommission:
The Cascades and Dragonstooth clusters have now run beyond their intended lifecycle and will be removed from service during the January maintenance. The login nodes will remain accessible for a short period of time after the maintenance to coordinate any final data transfers needed from the attached storage targets. See the link above for more details and some instructions. 

2023 additional resource acquisition underway:
Details are being finalized for the purchase and acquisition of a new CPU-based compute resources. Timelines for delivery and installation work are still evolving, but initially hope to make it available to researcher in Summer 2023. The underlying hardware is based on the AMD's just-released "Genoa" line of CPUs and should provide significant performance increases for many workloads.

Upcoming Computational Workshops:
VT Computing Bootcamps with Python or R:
VT Faculty, Staff, Students, and Community are invited to register for Software Carpentry online (Zoom) workshops January 5-6 or 9-10, 2023. Each two-day workshop covers command line programming (BASH), version control (Git), and programming in Python or R. Registration is free but limited and you do not need any programming experience to participate. Improve your collaboration, pick up a new tool, or prepare to use the ARC high-performance computing resources! Details and registration on the Libraries Calendar or PDN Catalog. Contact Nathaniel Porter (ndporter@vt.edu) with questions or accommodation requests.

Getting help with ARC:

Best regards,

Advanced Research Computing