Road to Niagara 2: GPC Reduction

October 26, 2017 in news, Road_to_Niagara

This is the second of a series of posts on the transition to SciNet’s new supercomputer called “Niagara”, which will replace the General Purpose Cluster (GPC) and Tightly Coupled Cluster (TCS). The transition to Niagara will take place in the fall of 2017, and the system is planned to be available to users in early 2018.

The University of Toronto has awarded the contract for Niagara, which means its installation will start soon. To make room for this system, the General Purpose Cluster will be reduced from 30,912 to 16,800 cores on Tuesday November 28, 2017, at 12:00 noon.

Niagara is estimated to be installed, operational and ready for users towards the end of February 2018. At that time, the GPC will be decommissioned.

Even before official ready-date, there will a period in which select users can try out and port their codes to Niagara.

After the friendly-user period, all current users of the GPC (and former users of the TCS) will get access to Niagara (and their allocations on GPC or TCS will be carried over).

The setup will also be tailored to large parallel computations. Nonetheless, there will still be a fair amount of backfill opportunity for smaller jobs.

Although the details of the Niagara system are yet to be announced, existing SciNet users can get more information about the new system here.