COSMOS DECOMMISSIONING ON JUNE 29

COSMOS, the ALTIX 3700 128-cpu symmetric multiprocessor and at one time our computational flagship, will be retired on Monday, June 29th. We urge current users to port their codes to HYDRA as soon as practicable and to back up all valuable files not residing in their home directories. Because COSMOS has not been under hardware or software maintenance for the last three years, a repair from a hardware failure may just be too costly to afford. Supercomputing Facility analysts are always available to help with with the transition to HYDRA.

By its retirement, COSMOS will have capped five and a half years of extremely reliable (99.9% uptime) operation. It remains the favorite of many users and the only system on campus with large enough RAM (128GB) to accommodate serial jobs that require large amounts of it . Chemistry has expressed interest in assuming control and administration of COSMOS and plans to welcome users from other areas. We will keep our users posted on any relevant developments.