ARC maintenance completed; Important storage notices

[Advanced Research Computing]

Hello all,

The maintenance on Tinkercliffs and Infer is complete. Jobs which were in queue are now starting and running and you may log in and resume normal interaction with the clusters.

We would like to draw your attention to some important storage system changes which were implemented during the maintenance:

 1. The storage system which was supporting /projects and /work on Tinkercliffs and Infer has been taken offline due to the frequent failures it has experienced over the last 18 months. 

2. /projects data is now migrated to a new storage platform, but accessible exactly as before.

3. /work on Tinkercliffs and Infer is decommissioned as a storage target in favor of using "scratch" filesystems for working data and /projects for longer term storage. For the next two weeks, you can retrieve any data you had there at the read-only mount /beegfs/work. Jobs which depended on /work will need to be revised to use different storage targets.

4. ARC is beginning a campaign to advocate for the use of "scratch" filesystems as the working directory for jobs. This provides scalability and performance far superior to storage targets like /home and /projects

5. /fastscratch (Tinkercliffs only) will be transitioning to a true "scratch" filesystem including the auto-deletion of files which are not actively being used.

More details and tips are at this link:

https://www.docs.arc.vt.edu/resources/storage-changes-sp22.html

Submit a 4Help request: https://arc.vt.edu/help

Documentation portal: https://docs.arc.vt.edu

Office Hours: https://arc.vt.edu/office-hours

Regards, 
Advanced Research Computing 
https://www.arc.vt.edu