View "What's New" HPCMP e-Newsletter
05/11/12
AFRL DSRC Cray XE6 RAPTOR - Extended Maintenance beginning 8 June
As part of the TI-11/12 acquisition, RAPTOR will undergo an upgrade of its operating system, processors and memory starting 8 June. It is anticipated that RAPTOR's return to service will be in about a month from the start date. Please plan your job/reservation resource requirements with this information in mind. More details will be provided when they become available.
WORKSPACE:
The AFRL DSRC STRONGLY suggests that users move data from workspace to the Center-Wide File System (CWFS) PRIOR to this upgrade period. Data on workspace is volatile and is not automatically backed up.
If you have any questions, please contact the Consolidated Customer Assistance Center (CCAC) at 877-CCAC-039 (877-222-2039).
04/02/12
Using Matlab's deploytool to Create Stand-Alone Executables
You can create stand-alone executables from Matlab interpreted codes. The linked tar archive describes how to do that, and also how to incorporate ancillary codes into the build. An example is illustrated for Harold. It has been tested on other machines as well. The advantage you gain is leveraging licenses for development purposes while production runs do not have to reserve nor wait for a license. While minor, you also may gain up to 2% run-time reduction. The linked tar archive contains step-by-step instructions (deploytool.doc) accompanied by an example. You may download it here.
For more information, please contact CCAC at help@ccac.hpc.mil or 1-877-222-2039.
01/20/12
Enhanced Shared License Buffer for Commercial Applications Now Available
We are pleased to announce that on 30 January 2012, a new and more robust Shared License Buffer (SLB) will be used to manage HPCMP commercial software. The new SLB will control the licenses for Abaqus, Accelrys, ANSYS CFD, Cobalt, and MATLAB and a license reservation will now be required before checking out any of these licenses. Additionally, the new SLB will coordinate the sharing of software licenses across all systems to ensure that jobs that have a license reservation will get the licenses that they reserved.
Important points users need to be aware of are:
License reservations will now be mandatory. The original SLB was created to promote fair, consistent, and reliable access to software licenses managed as shared assets by the Enterprise Software Management Team. Recent analysis has shown that the practice of accessing licenses without a license reservation is causing high numbers of jobs with proper license reservations to fail. As a result, the new SLB has an enforcement mechanism that prevents users from acquiring licenses unless they have an SLB license reservation.
Except for certain license names, getting a license reservation for a PBS job is unchanged. The user simply lists the licenses needed in the PBS job script. PBS will acquire the license reservation from the SLB and the job will only start after the license reservation request is approved. The names of new license features are listed below in bold.
Users may reserve the following licenses:
- Abaqus:abaqus
- Accelrys:MSI_TokenR; MS_gulp; MS_visualizer
- ANSYS CFD:acfd_solver; anshpc (Fluent is no longer available - See paragraph below)
- Cobalt:cobalt; cobalt-overset
- MATLAB:MATLAB; MATLAB_Dist_Comp_engine
Typical examples of license requests include:
- #PBS -l cobalt=N,cobalt-overset=N
- #PBS -l abaqus=N (for N licenses, not N cpus)
- #PBS -l MSI_TokenR=1
- #PBS -l acfd_solver=1,anshpc=N
- #PBS -l MATLAB=1
ANSYS CFD (ACFD) has replaced Fluent. ACFD users can request licenses for an 'N' CPU job with the following:
#PBS -l acfd_solver=1,anshpc=N
Additionally, the Software Management Team is pleased to announce that geographic pools have been eliminated by our new license contract with ANSYS. This means all ANSYS users now have access to a shared pool of 2,048 HPC tokens.
The SLB offers a new, interactive way to make license reservations. Users performing interactive work such as pre- or post-processing with SLB-managed applications will need to obtain a license through the SLB. Scripts are available to interactively query the SLB, make reservations, and terminate reservations.
For more information on the SLB, including complete lists of licensed features and interactive scripts, please visit the CCAC User Portal (https://help.ccac.hpc.mil). Click on the "Documentation" tab and look for "Shared License Buffer".
Please do not hesitate to contact the CCAC Help Desk if you have any questions.
Email: help@ccac.hpc.mil
Web: http://www.ccac.hpc.mil
Phone: 1-877-222-2039
Last modified: May 18, 2012
