NCSA's Platinum and Titan to be Retired July 19

On July 19, 2004, NCSA's Pentium III cluster (known as platinum) and Itanium I cluster (known as titan) will both be retired from computational service. Since the Itanium II cluster (Mercury, which is part of the TeraGrid) and the Xeon cluster (Tungsten) have been available, users should currently be making progress in migrating applications to these newer resources.

A smooth transition is anticipated due to the strong similarity of architectures available as target platforms. Detailed information about Tungsten and Mercury is available online. Users who require assistance in migrating their codes should contact the HPC Consulting Office at 217-244-1144 or by e-mail at consult@ncsa.uiuc.edu.

All user processes on platinum and titan will be terminated at 11:59 PM, July 19, 2004. After this time user access will be denied to all nodes of the clusters. All users are responsible for storing any needed data from the filesystems on the clusters to the UniTree mass storage system or some other alternative location prior to the deadline.

The unused balance of allocations on platinum and titan may be transferred to other NCSA machines at the request of the project's Principal Investigator (PI). These machines include Tungsten (the Xeon cluster), Mercury (the Itanuim 2 cluster) and Copper (the IBM p690 systems). These allocations will expire on their original expiration date. The PI must specifically request that an allocation balance be transferred and specify the system to which it will be transferred, otherwise the project will be terminated. Platinum SUs will be converted to Tungsten (Xeon) SUs by applying a conversion factor of 1/5, to Mercury SUs (Itanium 2) by applying a conversion factor of 1/6, and to Copper SUs (p690) by applying a conversion factor of 1/3. Likewise, Titan SUs will be converted to Tungsten (Xeon) SUs by applying a conversion factor of 1/2, to Mercury SUs (Itanium 2) by applying a conversion factor of 1/2, and to Copper SUs (p690) by applying a conversion factor of 1.

All requests for unused allocation balance transfers should be sent to the Allocations Department at allocations@ncsa.uiuc.edu. The request must list the project's Principal Investigator, the project psn, the amount of SUs to be transferred, and the machine to which transfer will be made. A transfer request must be made by July 5, 2004 in order to guarantee that the transfer will be made before platinum and titan are shut down.

We wish to make this transition as smooth as possible for you. If you have questions or concerns, please contact John Towns, Division Director for Scientific Computing, by phone at 217-244-3228 or by email at jtowns@ncsa.uiuc.edu. If you require further assistance in migrating your applications, please contact the HPC Consulting Office as soon as possible, as noted above.