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Production

                                                         March 18, 2003
NCSA User Community:

Following my prior notes regarding the installation of the NCSA IBM p690
systems, to upgrade our SMP computing capability, NCSA will be placing these
systems in production mode on April 1, 2003.  The Friendly User period has been
very useful in sorting out the issues with setting up and configuring the
environment and a number of the Friendly Users have been quite successful in
bringing their applications up and optimizing them.

While we still have a few remaining issues to sort out, we are planning to put
the systems in production mode on April 1, 2003.  We anticipate resolving these
remaining issues in the time between now and that date, but should they
persist, or new problems arise, we will notify you of any impact to this
schedule.

At this point, we will no longer be accepting Friendly User access requests for
the systems.  Further, those with current Friendly User projects will need to
either have a peer-reviewed allocation or request a Small Allocation project on
the systems in order to have access beyond March 31, 2003.  For information on
getting allocations see:

     http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/UserInfo/Allocations/Overview.html

Given that these system are intended as an upgrade/replacement for the SGI
Origin2000 systems that have run so successfully over the past several years
here at NCSA, we would like to encourage those with current allocations on the
Origin2000s to transfer all or part of their remaining allocations to the p690
systems.  Please note that the Origin2000 systems at NCSA will be
decommissioned on September 30, 2003.  A favorable conversion rate of 2:1 for
Origin2000 to IBM p690 Service Units (SUs) is available through June 30, 2003
for current Origin2000 allocations.  

To request transfers of allocations to the IBM p690 systems, please contact 
the NCSA Allocations staff at allocations@ncsa.uiuc.edu.  In that email
indicate the project principal investigator, the project psn (three letter
project code), and whether you wish to transfer all the Origin service units 
or only a partial number of the service units (list how many SUs.)

As noted previously, there are 12 32-processor systems configured as follows:

All systems have:
  32 IBM POWER4 Processors (1.3GHz, 5.2Gflop/s)
  64 GBytes RAM
   4 2x FiberChannel interfaces
   4 Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) interfaces

Four of the systems are configured with additional memory to bring them up to 
256 GBytes total each.

More details regarding the p690 systems at NCSA are available at:
    http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/UserInfo/Resources/Hardware/IBMp690/

For general information about the IBM pSeries 690 system, see:
    http://www.ibm.com/servers/eserver/pseries/hardware/tour/690_briefing.html

NCSA staff have been working to bring the systems to a production state and we
look forward to the systems being a useful addition to the available resources.

If you should have any questions, please feel free to direct them to me, John
Towns <jtowns@ncsa.edu> or to the NCSA Consulting Office, consult@ncsa.edu
(217-244-1144).

Regards,
John Towns
IBM pSeries 690:usr/news/Production
Last Modified: March 18, 2003