Neon shutdown
The Neon HPC cluster will be shutdown on January 7, 2019. Nodes that still work on Working Neon nodes will be carried over and implemented integrated into Argon and accessible as of January 21, 2019. This means that the data from your Neon home/scratch will have to be copied and stored either on to your existing Argon storage or stored locally. Neon-era node failures in an investor queue will be replenished by extra UI inventory while supplies last. As of June 29, 2020, we no longer have inventory to replenish failed Neon-era nodes in an investor queue.
Below you can find a timeline of the transition.:
- May 1, 2018 - HPC Model Change Decision Made & Consumer GPU Nodes Announced
- July/August 2018 - First Phase 2 Argon GPU Nodes Installed
- November 1, 2018 - No New Neon Accounts Created
- January 7, 2019 - Neon System Shutdown
- January 21, 2019 - Neon nodes reinstalled and accessible in Argon.
- March 1, 2019 - Last day to transfer data off Neon /home and /nfsscratch
...
Your storage:
Your data on Neon will only be stored maintained until March 1, 2019. Please be advised that the any data being copied migrated from Neon home/scratch to a local machine will have to must be decompressed, and therefore may end up being larger than what it showed on appears on Neon. When copying data from Neon → Argon homes, your storage for your Argon home keep in mind that data stored on Argon homes cannot exceed 1TB of data. Reminder that the inability to submit jobs occurs once the storage quota exceeds 90%. To check your current storage, login to Neon and use the command below:
If you receive a message stating that your home account has reached its quota, and you cannot fill it any farther, you must remove some large files from your home directory. Sometimes, the rm command will fail with a message of "Quota has been reached." If this happens, here is what you can do to correct the issue....
Copy the contents of /dev/null to this file. This will basically make the file a pointer to NULL values with a size of 0.
cp /dev/null name_of_file_to_delete...
| Code Block |
|---|
[jhetrick@argon-login-1 ~]$ df -h .
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
172.29.4.35:/dpool01/Homes/jhetrick 1.0T 432G 593G 43% /Users/jhetrick |
If you find that you have run out of space in the process of copying data and cannot remove it, please see: What to do if the 'rm' command isn't deleting files.
When copying large amounts of data from Neon to Argon-nfsscratch, remember that data that is placed there will be cleared 60 days later as part of our cleaning policy. The scratch cleaning policy on neon-nfsscratch will be removed on January 7th so that no data will be removed by that policy prior to the host being decommissioned on March 7.
Methods to obtain data:
The login to Neon will be going away on January 7th so it is advised against using relying on mounting your home account to transfer storage. The preferred method will be using As users will be unable to long into Neon after January 7, 2019, we recommend that users utilize data.hpc.uiowa.edu to transfer stored data rather than relying on mounting their home accounts directly. This will be the new method of mounting Argon home accounts moving forward due to underlying changes in how home storage space will be provided.
The easiest method will be to mount your HPC directories with CIFS via data.hpc.uiowa.edu.
Fetch, WinSCP and GridFTP will all use this server address and is documented as such.
All pieces of software will connect to the server with . You can use this server which allows you to access your neon-home and neon-nfsscratch. This alleviates the need to use a third party program. Argon and Neon are both mounted in the same way. Refer to the table below to mount home/scratch properly. If you have never mounted a network drive before, please click here.
Note that Windows will use backslashes, whereas a Mac will use forward slashes.
| /<cluster>_scratch | Your HPC scratch directory. For <cluster>, this is either "neon" or "argon" |
| /<cluster>_home | Your HPC home directory. For <cluster>, this is either "neon" or "argon" |
Windows (scratch)
\\data.hpc.uiowa.edu\
Windows (home)
Mac (scratch)
smb://data.hpc.uiowa.edu/
Same thing as above, but for Mac. You can mount network drives on Mac by going to your desktop and hitting command (⌘) + K.
Mac (home)
Third-party software
Fetch, WinSCP and GridFTP will all also connect to the server data.hpc.uiowa.edu. Refer to the table below to choose the address storage path that pertains to you. Note that this is different than via the CIFS method above.
| /hpchomes/<cluster>/<hawkid>/ | Your HPC home directory. For <cluster>, this is either "neon" or "argon" |
| /Dedicated/<sharename>/ | Dedicated shares |
| /Shared/<sharename>/ | Shared shares |
| /nfsscratch/<cluster>/ | The NFS scratch filesystem. For <cluster>, this is either "neon" or "argon" |
Fetch (mac Mac only): This will mount your Neon account. Follow the table above for setting a path to get your data from shared shares, dedicated shares, or from nfsscratch. In this case, the path below is just for home directories. You can then execute "get" commands to pull your data from Neon onto your local workstation (keep in mind the compression aspect).
Note: This method will require a Duo authentication.
WinSCP (windows data is compressed). If you are doing this off campus (or not connected to the VPN), ensure that the "port" is 40. Note that this will require a Duo authentication and you should see notification on your default device.
WinSCP (Windows only): This will mount your Neon account. Follow the table above for setting a path to get your data from shared shares, dedicated shares, or from nfsscratch. In this casethe example below, the path below is just for home directories. The server will just be data.hpc.uiowa.edu - we have to manually link it to the proper directory. Once connected, you can just drag and drop files from Neon onto your local workstation. If you are doing this off campus (or not connected to the VPN), use port 40.
After you authenticate with Duo, you will notice your path looks like this. Click the very first character, the forward slash, twice. It will open a "Open directory window" where you then can then enter the path from the above table for dedicated, shared, or nfsscratch.
Globus/GridFTP:
Please follow this link: Share & transfer data using Globus Online