- Project PIs & Membership Managers: Add Back Your Users In Iris
- Allocation Year 2022 Began Last Wednesday, January 19
- New Default Python module as of AY transition; All Python modules support conda activate
- NERSC Federated Identity Pilot Has Begun!
January 2022
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23 24 *25* 26 27 28 29 25 Jan Perlmutter Maintenance [1]
30 *31* 31 Jan Monterey Data Workshop Subs Due [2]
February 2022
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20 *21* 22 23 24 25 26 21 Feb Presidents Day Holiday [3]
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March 2022
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13 14 15 *16* 17 18 19 16 Mar Cori Monthly Maintenance [4]
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27 28 29 30 31
- January 25, 2022: Perlmutter Maintenance
- January 31, 2022: Deadline for Submissions to Monterey Data Workshop
- February 21, 2022: Presidents Day Holiday (No Consulting or Account Support)
- March 16, 2022: Cori Monthly Maintenance
- All times are Pacific Time zone
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Upcoming Planned Outage Dates (see Outages section for more details)
- Tuesday: Perlmutter
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Other Significant Dates
- April 20, May 18, June 15, & July 20, 2022: Cori Monthly Maintenance Window
- May 30, 2022: Memorial Day Holiday (No Consulting or Account Support)
- June 20, 2022: Juneteenth Holiday (No Consulting or Account Support)
- July 4, 2022: Independence Day Holiday (No Consulting or Account Support)
- September 5, 2022: Labor Day Holiday (No Consulting or Account Support)
- November 24-25, 2022: Thanksgiving Holiday (No Consulting or Account Support)
- December 23, 2022-January 2, 2023: Winter Shutdown (Limited Consulting and Account Support)
Berkeley Lab, where NERSC is located, is operating under public health restrictions. NERSC continues to remain open while following site-specific protection plans. We remain in operation, with the majority of NERSC staff working remotely, and staff essential to operations onsite. We do not expect significant changes to our operations in the next few months.
You can continue to expect regular online consulting and account support as well as schedulable online appointments. Trainings continue to be held online. Regular maintenances on the systems continue to be performed while minimizing onsite staff presence, which could result in longer downtimes than would occur under normal circumstances.
Because onsite staffing is so minimal, we request that you continue to refrain from calling NERSC Operations except to report urgent system issues.
For current NERSC systems status, please see the online MOTD and current known issues webpages.
If you were not able to mark continuing users before the Allocation Year transition last week, it's not too late to add them back into your project.
To take action, please log into Iris and go to your project's Roles tab. Click the "From Last Year" button on the right side of the member list to view users from last year who are missing from this year's list. Select the users you want to continue, and click "Add Selected Users" to add them.
The 2022 Allocation Year (AY22) began at 7 am Pacific Time last Wednesday, January 19, 2022.
There are a few changes for AY22. Of note:
- Charge factors have been recalibrated to the new Perlmutter machine. The new currency, "CPU Node Hours", are 1/400th the size of the former "NERSC Hours" currency. Using one hour of time on a Cori Haswell node costs 0.34 CPU Node Hours, and one hour of time on a Cori KNL costs 0.2 CPU Node Hours. When we begin charging for Perlmutter (which will likely happen for the second half of the year), the charge for a single Perlmutter CPU node for one hour will be 1.0.
- Two separate allocations for CPU and GPU architectures. Projects will have allocations on CPU and GPU architectures, which are separate and cannot be traded or exchanged.
- New default Python Module at AY Transition. Please see the entry on this topic below.
- Cori defaults will change in March, 2022. Cori defaults will remain the same at the AY transition, but the machine will undergo what we hope will be its final major system upgrade during the March maintenance, at which time the default user environment will be updated.
For more information, please see the Allocation Year Transition page.
The initial phase of the Perlmutter supercomputer is in the NERSC machine room, running user jobs.
We have added many early users onto the machine. We hope to add even more users soon. Anyone interested in using Perlmutter may apply using the Perlmutter Access Request Form.
The second phase of the machine, consisting of CPU-only nodes, will arrive early this year. After all the new nodes arrive, all of Perlmutter will be taken out of service and integrated over a period that we anticipate could take up to 8 weeks. We are developing a plan for integration that will reduce the amount of time the entire system is down. We will let you know when this plan is finalized.
This newsletter item will be updated each week with the latest Perlmutter status.
To help ready your account for Perlmutter, please review your dotfiles. The same
home file system is mounted across all NERSC systems, so your
.bashrc/.cshrc/etc. files (dotfiles) need to work on all systems. The
NERSC_HOST variable can help you distinguish between systems and to set
customizations for each system. The NERSC_HOST variable is set automatically to
"perlmutter" on Perlmutter and to "cori" on Cori.
Some users may have older dot files that are setting the NERSC_HOST variable without first checking to see whether it already has a value, which will cause problems on Perlmutter. Please ensure that this is not the case in your dotfiles. Feel free to reach out to NERSC consulting with any questions or issues.
Python users take note: On Jan 19, 2022 at the Allocation Year rollover, NERSC changed our default Python and Python3 modules on Cori to python/3.9-anaconda-2021.11. Please note that older Python modules will remain available, but users must specify the full module name to continue to use them.
Updates in this module include:
- Python 3.9
- Support for conda activate
- Mamba 0.7.6 (a faster alternative to conda)
- netcdf4 1.5.8
- mpi4py 3.1.3
- authlib 0.15.4 (support for NERSC's Superfacility API)
At the AY transition, we retroactively changed the behavior of all
Cori Python modules to support conda activate. Please see
these pending updates to our documentation
for more details. As always, if you have a question, please contact us via
our helpdesk.
Note for pip users: pip packages installed via --user are
installed at $HOME/.local/cori/3.9-anaconda-2021.11 (defined by
$PYTHONUSERBASE).
Note that the python/3.9-anaconda-2021.11 module was already the default on
Perlmutter and conda activate functionality is already supported there.
Berkeley Lab staff can now follow a one-time process to link their Lab identity to their NERSC identity, then subsequently use their Lab credentials to log into resources such as Iris, ServiceNow, and the NERSC web site.
We anticipate that soon, more than two-thirds of our users will be able to use their institutional login credentials to log into these NERSC services.
The appearance of the NERSC login page for these services has now changed: instead of the form requesting your login name and password you will see a menu where you can choose the institution to use for login.
During this first phase, if you are not Berkeley Lab staff, simply select "NERSC" as the authentication source, and you will be sent to the familiar NERSC authentication form. If you are Lab staff, we encourage you to select the "Berkeley Lab" option and try it out!
The DOE Monterey Data Workshop 2022 is a virtual 2-day meeting to share the latest research in scientific artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in preparation for the Fall 2022 Monterey Data Conference. The Workshop brings together researchers from DOE national laboratories, facilities, universities, and industry to share research in AI and ML. The two primary goals of this meeting are to
- Share best practices and cutting-edge research on scientific AI/ML and broaden participation in the field
- Identify key challenges and technologies in scientific machine learning that will shape invited speakers and discussion at the fall Monterey Data Conference, an invite-only event attended by lab leaders, leading academic and industry partners.
The workshop is designed to promote discussion and feedback. The meeting, a comibination of technical talks, panel/breakout sessions, and time for informal interactions with colleagues, will be held virtually and may provide an on-site venue at Berkeley Lab if possible.
The organizers are seeking speakers to give short (~20 minute) talks on progress, ideas, and/or challenges on AI/ML. We encourage talks from early-career scientists and prioritize talks in the following topical areas:
- Scalable and productive computing systems for AI
- Interpretable, robust, science-informed AI methods
- Novel scientific AI applications at large scale
- AI for self-driving scientific facilities
We are also soliciting ideas for breakout sessions and volunteers to lead these sessions related to the above topics.
For more information and to submit, please see https://www.montereydataconference.org/workshop-2022. Submissions are due next Monday, January 31, 2022.
NERSC currently has several openings for postdocs, system administrators, and more! If you are looking for new opportunities, please consider the following openings:
- Scientific Data Architect: Collaborate with scientists to meet their Data, AI, and Analytics needs on NERSC supercomputers.
- Exascale Computing Postdoctoral Fellow: Collaborate with ECP math library and scientific application teams to enable the solution of deep, meaningful problems targeted by the ECP program and other DOE/Office of Science program areas.
- Data & Analytics Team Group Lead: Provide vision and guidance and lead a team that provides data management, analytics and AI software, support, and expertise to NERSC users.
- Cyber Security Engineer: Help protect NERSC from malicious and unauthorized activity.
- Machine Learning Engineer: Apply machine learning and AI to NERSC systems to improve on their ability to deliver productive science output.
- HPC Performance Engineer: Join a multidisciplinary team of computational and domain scientists to speed up scientific codes on cutting-edge computing architectures.
(Note: You can browse all our job openings by first navigating to https://jobs.lbl.gov/jobs/search/. Under "Business," select "View More" and scroll down to find and select the checkbox for "NE-NERSC".)
We know that NERSC users can make great NERSC employees! We look forward to seeing your application.
- Cori
- 03/16/22 07:00-20:00 PST, Scheduled Maintenance
- 04/20/22 07:00-20:00 PST, Scheduled Maintenance
- 05/18/22 07:00-20:00 PST, Scheduled Maintenance
- Perlmutter
- 01/25/22 07:00-20:00 PST, Scheduled Maintenance
Visit http://my.nersc.gov/ for latest status and outage information.
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