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. 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

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, keep in mind that data stored on Argon homes cannot exceed 1TB. 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: 

[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:

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. 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.

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 storage path that pertains to you. Note that this is different than via the CIFS method above.

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 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 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: Share & transfer data using Globus