Date: Tue, 31 Mar 2009 16:50:59 -0400
From: glenn@bu.edu
Subject: Katana enhancement and p690 phase-out

Dear Colleague:

We are writing to you today to announce an expansion of our Linux cluster with
the addition of 8-processor nodes and the phasing out of our aging IBM Power
Series p690 computers.  The p690s have performed extremely well for our
community and have been heavily utilized, but these seven year old systems have
become prohibitively expensive to maintain and will be decommissioned at the
end of this semester. If you are a user of the IBM p690 systems, you will need
to transition to one of the other computing systems as soon as possible.

The systems which are affected by this announcement are the three older
32-processor p690 systems, named Kite, Frisbee and Pogo, as well as the
16-processor system Domino. These are the machines that run jobs submitted to
the 16- and 32-way parallel batch queues, specifically p4-mp16 and p4-mp32. The
newer, 8-processor IBM p655 systems are not affected by this announcement. The
p655 systems run all interactive jobs (i.e., logins to Twister), the single
processor (p4-short, p4-long, p4-verylong), 4-way parallel (p4-mp4), and 8-way
parallel (p4-mp8) queues.

To mitigate the shutdown of the IBM p690 systems, we have added four new
8-processor Intel nodes to the Katana Linux cluster. On our benchmarks of
commonly used codes on the p690, the new nodes offer more than twice the
performance on a per processor basis and run 8-way parallel jobs faster than
the equivalent 16-way parallel job on the older p690s.  We intend to add
additional 8-processor nodes, budgets permitting, once usage begins to migrate
off the p690s and onto the Katana system. More technical information regarding
the use of the new nodes will be posted to system message and to our Web site -
http://scv.bu.edu/about/NewDocs/katana8.txt.

We have begun the phase-out of the p690 systems with the cancellation of their
hardware maintenance contracts. It is our intent to leave these machines
operational for the remainder of this semester, barring any hardware
failures. At the end of the semester the machines will be shut down.  If you
are a user of the IBM p690 systems you will need to migrate your usage to one
of the other systems as soon as possible. If you wish to continue using the IBM
Power Series platform, you may use the p655 systems which are completely
compatible with the p690, albeit with fewer processors.  If you are moving your
codes, you may wish to consider either the new Linux nodes or the IBM Blue Gene
system. As always, the SCV staff stand ready to assist you in porting your code
and with any issues which you may encounter in transitioning to another
platform.

Sincerely,

Glenn Bresnahan, Director, Scientific Computing and Visualization
Claudio Rebbi, Director, Center for Computational Science