New Allocation Year Changes

Note: Allocation year 2008 (AY08) runs from Tuesday, January 8, 2008 through Monday, January 12, 2009.

Below are major changes that will go into effect with the beginning of AY08 on Tuesday, January 8, 2008.

• AY08 Allocation Awards
• Seaborg Decommissioning
• Franklin Charging
• Franklin Queue Changes
• NIM Refreshing
• New Repositories
• Scheduled Downtimes
• Account Creation/Validation Moratorium
• Discontinued Users
• Deadline for AY07 Startup Requests

AY08 Allocation Awards

The AY08 allocation awards were e-mailed to project PIs and PI Proxies on December 19. The awards are listed on the allocation awards web page. On January 8, the new allocations of CPU time and mass storage will replace those from AY07. Unused allocations do not carry over into the new allocation year.

Seaborg Decommissioning

Seaborg will be retired at the end of AY07. There will be limited user access on Tuesday, January 8, 2008, to allow users to retrieve files that might have been created by batch jobs still running at the end of AY07. Complete information about Seaborg's decommissioning may be found here.

Franklin Charging

Repository charging for MPP time on Franklin will begin at 00:01 on January 8, 2008. Users should review jobs that were placed in the queues during AY07 (when Franklin was "free"), to verify that they still want to run these jobs under charging conditions. Complete information about Franklin's charging rates may be found here.

Franklin Queue Changes

The maximum wallclock time limit for Franklin's production queues (low, regular, and premium) will be increased from 12 hours to 24 hours. Also, the demarcation between "small" and "big" jobs, which affects scheduling priority, will change from 2048 nodes (4096 processor cores) to 1208 nodes (2416 cores). Complete information about Franklin's batch queues may be found here.

NIM Refreshing

Users must logout and login again to NIM to get a correct view of AY08 settings. This only applies to NIM sessions that were active at 00:01 on January 8.

New Repositories

New repositories are initially created with no members. Principal Investigators should contact NERSC Account Support at 1-800-666-3772, menu option 2, or 1-510-486-8612 to have themselves added to their new repositories. The PI should then add users to the new repository. Instructions for adding users to repositories can be found here.

Scheduled System Downtimes

The MPP production machines (Franklin, Seaborg, Jacquard, Bassi, and DaVinci), and NGF will be taken down according to the following schedule (all time PST):

• January 5 - January 7: During this time, batch reservations will be used to prevent long-running jobs from starting (that is, jobs that would have no chance of finishing before the end of AY07).
• January 7, 13:00: Franklin down for scheduled maintenance.
• January 7, 15:30: New transfers to HPSS blocked; in-progress transfers will have 30 minutes to complete.
• January 7, 16:00: Disable user logins, kill all user processes (interactive and batch).
• January 7, 16:30: Begin system maintenance activities.
• January 7, 20:00: Begin final accounting for AY07.
• January 8, 00:01: Systems available to users; batch processing resumes.

• HPSS will remain available during the above system downtimes.
• PDSF will remain up during this period, however PDSF batch jobs will not have access to NGF.

Account Creation/Validation Moratorium

No user accounts will be created or validated after Friday, December 28 at noon PST until Tuesday, January 8 at 08:00 PST. Any such changes made in NIM during this time will not take effect until after AY08 begins.

Discontinued Users

Effective January 8, a number of current (AY07) users will be considered "discontinued". This can happen for the following reasons:

• A user belongs to only one AY07 project that is not being supported in AY08.
• A user has been explicitly dropped from a repository by the Principal Investigator or Project Manager of that repository.

All discontinued MPP users will have limited login access to their authorized machines until February 8. Such users will be unable to submit batch jobs, but will be able to perform limited interactive tasks. The intent of this access is to allow discontinued users the ability to "clean up", e.g., transfer files back to their home institution.

All discontinued users will continue to have write access to HPSS until February 8, and then limited read-only and delete access for six months (until August 8, 2008). This will allow such users to transfer important data back to their home institution or to active NERSC users and to delete files that are no longer needed.

Deadline for AY07 Startup Requests

Startup awards are small allocations made throughout the allocation year. The deadline for AY07 startup awards is 17:00 PST, Thursday, December 20. Any startup requests submitted after this deadline will not be processed until after AY08 starts on January 8.