ASC development day, 2023 August
We had another development day (previous: ASC development day, 2023 March). It went mostly like the last one, and we have less important news for the world, but below is the summary anyway.
Stats
We have about 1550 people with accounts, with 202 new account requests in the last six months.
Most routine issues tend to be about software installation, which is good (this is the actually hard part, it’s good people ask us).
We are still on track for about 500 garage visits per year. We don’t try too hard to keep track of them all, we might get about 75% of them.
The number of interactive and Jupyter users are increasing, while Open OnDemand is decreasing. This is the wrong direction from what we’d like. We will open OOD to connections from all of Finland to make this easier.
Triton v3
Triton v3 is still on the way. This isn’t a new cluster, but a new operating system which individual nodes will be migrated to slowly (while maintaining the same accounts and data). Most of this happens in the background, but the change of base operating system images will require most code to be recompiled, which will require attention from many users. The transition can be made slowly, both old and new OSs will run for a time being. There won’t be a change in total amount of computing power.
An upcoming blog post will discuss this more, and the effects on users. Now is the time to start preparing. We still expect the transition to happen sometime in the autumn.
We are thinking to merge home and scratch directories, to make a common quota for both. This would improve usability by reducing the frequency of home quota affecting usage. We’d welcome any other usability suggestions.
Practically, we are using the chance to automate things even more, which should make it easier to manage in the future.
Teaching
Teaching has gone well. For this academic year, we’d like to add back in a few smaller, special-purpose courses (not just to teach them, but also to get good quality video recordings for the future).
Goals:
LUMI
LUMI is the new EU cluster with plentyful GPU resources. A user can essentially get as many GPU resources as they need with no waiting, but since the GPUs are AMD, there is some initial barrier. Our general feeling remains: “we won’t recommend our users directly go and use LUMI, but we recommend they talk with us first and we help them use it”.
Next steps:
Continue encouraging users to contact us.
RSEs will ask the top GPU user each week if they would like support with taking LUMI into use. We’ll go and do all the setup for them.
Slide on infoscreens around the buildings?