Dear PACE research community,
After we completed our second wave of user migration last week, we received some common questions from users in reference to the new cost model that was announced on September 29 and about the new cluster, Phoenix, in general, which we will address below for the benefit of the community:
- The Phoenix scheduler has been redesigned. Unlike previous PACE-managed clusters, there are only two queues on the Phoenix cluster: inferno and embers. To submit a job, you will need to specify a charge account (i.e., MAM account) that was/will be provided to you in the “welcome email” after migration to the Phoenix cluster in Coda. You may have access to multiple MAM accounts, for example, a PI and their user group may have access to an Institute sponsored account (GT-gburdell3 – $68/mo), account for refreshed PI cluster (e.g., GT-gburdell3-CODA20 -> $43,011.32), or account for recent FY20 purchase (e.g., GT-gburdell3-FY20Phase2 -> $17,860.75). For further details on submitting jobs on the Phoenix cluster, please refer to the documentation at http://docs.pace.gatech.edu/phoenix_cluster/submit_jobs_phnx/ .
- Access to departmental PACE resources (e.g. CoC, CEE, biology,…) are restructured based on departmental preferences. As with the rest of PACE, access is now managed at a group level, each owned by a specific PI, although the distribution of available departmental credits may vary from one department to another.
- We are in a process of providing PIs further details with regards to their cluster(s) from Rich datacenter that were refreshed and converted into credits/MAM account according to the new cost model. Additionally, PIs who participated in the FY20 purchases will receive further details about the conversion from purchased equipment to the credits/MAM account.
- As mentioned in our initial announcement on September 29, users will not be charged for their usage of compute resources until at least January 1, 2021. Until that time, all jobs that run on Phoenix are free as we work to migrate all users into the cluster and for the users to get familiar with the new environment. Please note that your credits will be declined, but we will reset your total before we start billing.
- All of your data has been migrated to Phoenix, but the structure has changed. Note that the data is now in your project storage under a different directory name, and the symbolic links to different locations have been broken due to this. Please visit our documentation for information on locating your group’s shared directory and on recreating symbolic links as documented at http://docs.pace.gatech.edu/phoenix_cluster/where_is_my_rich_data/ . For further details, please refer to the documentation at http://docs.pace.gatech.edu/phoenix_cluster/storage_phnx/ .
- pace-vnc-job command is functional, however, you will need to setup VNC for the Phoenix cluster. To setup VNC, remove ~/.vnc directory, then run vncpasswd to set the new password for VNC on the Phoenix cluster. After this, you will be able to submit pace-vnc-job with the additional MAM account that you will need to pass to the command.
If you have any questions, concerns or comments about your recent migration to Phoenix, upcoming migration or the new cost model, please direct them to pace-support@oit.gatech.edu.
Best,
The PACE Team