Date: Tue, 22 Apr 2003 13:25:56 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: SCF Origin 2000 Retirement - Final Phase

Dear Researcher,

The new IBM p690 system has been in production for some time.  As was 
described in a mailing on February 7th, the SGI Origin 2000 systems
are being phased out.  The first stage of this transition was the
decommissioning of the 64-processor machine, jacks.bu.edu.  The remainder 
of the SGI O2000 machines will be taken out of service as of May 30 of
this year.

For those of you who have not yet made the transition from the SGI systems 
to the IBM systems, it is important to do so in the very near future.  If 
you have questions about, or would like help with, porting your code to the 
new systems, you may contact our scientific programming consultants, Kadin 
Tseng (kadin@bu.edu) or Doug Sondak (sondak@bu.edu).  We have also established 
a repository of information on the IBM SP and p690 machines, which may be 
found at http://scv.bu.edu/SCV/IBMSP/.

User file systems (/usr1, /usr2, /usr3, /usr4) on the Origin2000 machines 
will continue to be accessible from the IBM SP and p690 for the summer months
(via /sgi/usr1, /sgi/usr2, /sgi/usr3, /sgi/usr4).  There will be a period, 
of approximately one day, in June, during which /project and /project2
will be unavailable, when those directories are transferred to a new storage 
system that is currently being put into place.  More details of the new
storage system will follow as we get closer to June.

The o2k queues (o2k-short, o2k-long, o2k-verylong, o2k-mp8long, o2k-mp16,
o2k-mp32) will be removed when the SGI's are decommissioned.  The sp queues
(sp-short, sp-long, sp-mp8, sp-mp16) and the p4 queues (p4-short, p4-long, 
p4-mp16, p4-mp32) will remain unchanged.  HAL will continue as the login node 
for the SP machines, and Twister will remain the login machine for the p690
machines.

As the SGI machines are being decommissioned, we are very pleased to announce 
the availability of the Linux Cluster for Friendly User testing.  The cluster
comprises 52 IBM x330s interconnected via Myrinet.  Each x330 has two 1.26 GHz
Intel Pentium 3 processors, and 1 Gb of memory.  This system provides roughly 
the same computational capacity as the 192-processor Origin 2000 system.
For more information, including the application form, go to
http://scv.bu.edu/SCV/cluster.html.

Glenn Bresnahan (glenn@bu.edu)