Neon HPC Transition

Neon shutdown

The Neon HPC cluster will be shutdown on January 7, 2019. Working Neon nodes will be 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. 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

For further information regarding the transition, please click here.

Your storage:

Your data on Neon will be maintained until March 1, 2019. Please be advised that any data being migrated from Neon home/scratch to a local machine must be decompressed, and therefore may end up being larger than it appears on Neon. When copying data from Neon → Argon homes, your storage for your Argon home cannot exceed 1TB of data. Reminder that the inability to submit jobs occurs once the storage quota exceeds 90%. To check your current storage, use the command below: 

[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

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:

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. 

Fetch, WinSCP and GridFTP will all use this server address and are documented as such.

All pieces of software will connect to the server with data.hpc.uiowa.edu. Refer to the table below to choose the address that pertains to you. 

Fetch (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). If you are doing this off campus (or not connected to the VPN), use port 40. Not that this method will require Duo authentication.

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 the example below, the path is for home directories. The server will be data.hpc.uiowa.edu - we have to manually link it to the proper directory. Once connected, you can 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: Globus Online