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2024 MGHPCC power downtime May 21-24, 2024

The yearly power downtime at our Holyoke data center, MGHPCC, has been scheduled.  This year the power outage will take place on a Wednesday/Thursday the week before the Memorial Day long weekend (Mon. 5/27/24). Ordinarily this is happens during a Monday/Tuesday or Tuesday/Wednesday timeframe, but due to scheduling conflicts with other universities that also use MGHPCC, the target days have…

Cannon 2.0

Summary FASRC is adding 216 Intel Sapphire Rapids nodes with 1TB of RAM each, 4 Intel Sapphire Rapids nodes with 2TB of RAM each and 144 A100 80GB GPUs to the Cannon cluster. The Sapphire Rapids cores will be made available in the new ‘sapphire’ partition. The new A100 GPUs will be added to the ‘gpu’ partition.  Partitions will be…

2023 MGHPCC downtime, and major OS and software changes

DOWNTIME COMPLETE The annual multi-day power downtime at MGHPCC (https://www.rc.fas.harvard.edu/blog/2023-downtime/) is complete (with exceptions noted below). Normal service resumes today (Friday June 9th) at 9am. As noted in previous communications, many changes have been made to the cluster and software. If you run jobs on the cluster and did not previously try out the test cluster, you will need to make…

Social Capital – The strength of our relationships and communities

In a new paper published in Nature, Raj Chetty's group unearths insights into social capital and how it shapes our nation and our people, both socially and economically.  Visit The Social Capital Atlas: https://www.socialcapital.org/ Read the paper: Nature 608, pages108–121 (2022)  Read the Harvard Gazette story: How Childhood Friendships Sway Economic Mobility 

Cluster Fragmentation

by Paul Edmon June 3, 2022 A common pitfall of High Performance Computing (HPC) scheduling is cluster fragmentation.  This is not unique to HPC mind you, any system where you have a limited amount of space that you try to fill with quasi random sized blocks of stuff will end up fragmented at some level (see your last game of…

2021 Cluster Upgrades – Sept. 30th 2021

  We have some exciting news about new resources we want to share with you. In the summer of 2019 we invested in direct water cooling and were able to bring you the Cannon cluster with 32,000 of the fastest Intel Cascade Lake cores. This 8-rack block of compute has formed the core of our computational capacity for the past…

Sex chromosome transformation and the origin of a male-specific X chromosome in the creeping vole

Matthew B. Couger, Scott W. Roy, Noelle Anderson, Landen Gozashti, Stacy Pirro, Lindsay S. Millward, Michelle Kim, Duncan Kilburn, Kelvin J. Liu, Todd M. Wilson, Clinton W. Epps, Laurie Dizney, Luis A. Ruedas, Polly Campbell Mystery solved? Chromosomal sex determination arises when an autosomal locus acquires a sex-determining function. In some taxa, this process occurs often. The XY system in…

Event Horizon Telescope Maps Emissions From Black Hole

The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration has published results showing how the project was able to map and create imagery of polarized emissions from material rotating within the magnetic field near the event horizon of the supermassive black hole in galaxy M87.  Scientists from Harvard's Center for Astrophysics and Black Hole Initiative used the FASRC cluster for several parts of this projects'…

Security advisory regarding Python/Conda/pip/PyPI

AUDIENCE: All Python/Conda users IMPACT: Potential malicious packages installed or malware downloaded Numerous packages containing malware/malicious links have been uploaded to the PyPI (Python Package Index) repository. Many of these have names which are slight misspellings of the names of other packages. The intention is to cause an installation of one of these packages if the package name is mistyped…