Hexagon: major upgrade on March 9th

Update 19.03 18:40: Upgrade is finished, machine is open for SSH access.

Update, Monday 19th: We are finalizing the upgrade, the machine is up and we expect to allow logins later today. When logging in for the first time, please remember to recompile ALL your applications and libraries to be compatible with the new system.


Hexagon will get a major hardware and software upgrade in the first week of March.

The current schedule is for the upgrade to start on March 9th 2012 at 8:00 (a delay of 1 week from initial announcement) and to last for about 1 week.

NOTE: A reservation is set in the queue system. Thus, jobs must have a walltime set so that they can finish before the maintenance to be allowed to start.

The upgraded hexagon will have the following specs:
* Cray XE6m-200
* 204.9 TFlops peak performance
* 22272 cores
* AMD Opteron 6276 (2.3GHz "Interlagos")
* 1392 CPUs (sockets)
* 696 nodes
* 32 cores per node
* 32GB RAM per node (1GB/core)
* New interconnect: Cray Gemini
* New topology: 2.5D Torus
* OS: Cray Linux Environment, CLE 4.0 (Based on Novell Linux SLES11sp1)

Although the user experience will be very much the same after the upgrade (with just newer versions of familiar software, and a faster machine) please observe the following critical point:

IMPORTANT! All applications MUST be recompiled to be compatible with the new and upgraded hexagon.

You can expect that the software list that is available via "modules" to be short right after the upgrade for then to grow during the next few weeks. Please be patient while we recompile and install the necessary applications and libraries.

We remind you that you have to move all files not related to your current runs out from the /work file system. Please see our previous email for details.

IMPORTANT! The old /work will be available on new hexagon only up to April 9th. On April 11th it will be completely DESTROYED!
It is therefore very important that you participate in moving data out of hexagon or transfer it to the new file-system. The old /work will be mounted back after a reformat and used as secondary storage.

You can follow the upgrade at our Syslog:
http://computing.uni.no/syslog

Please contact support-uib at notur.no if you have any questions regarding the upgrade.