PACE A Partnership for an Advanced Computing Environment

Monthly scratch deletion will resume on the Phoenix and Hive clusters in December, in accordance with PACE’s scratch deletion policy for files over 60 days old. Scratch deletion has been suspended since May 2022, due to an issue with a software upgrade on Phoenix’s Lustre storage system that was resolved during the November maintenance period. Researchers with data scheduled for deletion will receive warning emails on Tuesday, December 6, and Tuesday, December 13, and files will be deleted on Tuesday, December 20. If you receive an email notification next week, please review the files scheduled for deletion and contact PACE if you need additional time to relocate the files.

Scratch is intended to be temporary storage, and regular deletion of old files allows PACE to offer a large space at no cost to our researchers. Please keep in mind that scratch space is not backed up, and any important data for your research should be relocated to your research group’s project storage.

If you have any questions about scratch or any other storage location on PACE clusters, please contact PACE.

Dear Phoenix researchers, 

We have migrated 800 (out of 1319) nodes of our existing hardware as part of our ongoing Phoenix cluster migration to Slurm. PACE has continued our effort to provide a heterogenous hardware environment by adding 5 GPU nodes (2x Nvidia A100s per node) and 4 CPU nodes (2x AMD Epyc 7713 processors with 128 cores per node) to the Phoenix-Slurm cluster.  

Both service offerings provide exciting, new hardware for research computing at PACE. The A100 GPU nodes, which also include 2x AMD Epyc 7513 processors with 64 cores per node, provide a powerful option to our users for GPU compute in machine learning and scientific applications. The AMD Epyc CPU nodes provide a cost-effective alternative to Intel processors for research, with energy and equipment savings we pass to our users with a lower rate than our current base option. However, AMD CPUs still provide great value in traditional HPC due to higher memory bandwidth and core density. You can find out more about our latest costs in our rate study here. 

You can find out more information on our new nodes in our documentation here. We also provide documentation on how to use the A100 GPU nodes and AMD CPU nodes on Phoenix-Slurm. If you need further assistance with using these new resources, please feel free to reach out to us at pace-support@oit.gatech.edu or attend our next consulting session.

Best,  

-The PACE Team