From: David Turner (dpturner_at_lbl_dot_gov)
Date: 01/12/2005
Greetings NERSC SP User,
It has just been discovered that our SP mailing list has been
malfunctioning, and so the announcements of the last day or
two haven't been making it out of NERSC. Here is a summary:
Seaborg will be going down at 16:00 PST today, therefore we
are currently "draining" the system. The backfill class is
enabled. As I write this (13:50), there is a little more than
one hour until this happens, there are over 170 idle nodes,
and there are *NO* jobs in the backfill class. This is a great
opportunity to get quick turnaround for short, medium-parallel
jobs. To use the backfill class, use this keyword in your
batch script:
#@class = backfill
This class has a 4 hour time limit. Jobs still running at
16:00 today will be discarded, as will any pending jobs in the
backfill class.
The downtime is for software upgrades, file system maintenance, and
migration of users' home directories to a new file system. This
migration was originally scheduled for last December 15, but was
postponed until today.
Users should verify that they are not referencing their home directories
with names such as "/u1/dpturner". This type of reference will fail
when the system returns to operation on Thursday morning. References to
(for example) "/usr/common/homes/d/dpturner" will still succeed, as will
the use of the environment variable "$HOME" and the shell construct
"~dpturner" (again, using my login name "dpturner" as an example).
If you have any questions, please contact NERSC consulting at:
1-800-66-NERSC, menu option 3, 8 am - 5 pm, Pacific time
(510) 486-8600, menu option 3, 8 am - 5 pm, Pacific time
consult_at_nersc_dot_gov
http://help.nersc.gov/
--
Best regards,
David Turner
User Services Group email: dpturner_at_lbl_dot_gov
NERSC Division phone: (510) 486-4027
Lawrence Berkeley Lab fax: (510) 486-4316