Urgent Scheduled Maintenance for ASPIRE 2A+ on 7 March 2025, 3PM to 6.30PM

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Dear ASPIRE 2A+ Users,

We wish to inform you of an upcoming urgent scheduled maintenance on the ASPIRE2A+ system. This maintenance is essential to ensure the continued reliability and performance of our services.

Maintenance Details:

  • Start: 7 March 2025 (Friday), 3:00 PM SGT
  • End: 7 March 2025 (Friday), 6:30 PM SGT
  • Duration: 3.5 hours

Purpose:

  • To perform a service failover activity on the system.

Impact During the Maintenance Period:

  • During this period, you may experience a slight disruption in service. Specifically, you may not be able to submit jobs for a short period while the system is being normalised.

We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause and thank you for your understanding. Should you have any questions or need assistance, please contact our Helpdesk via the Service Desk Portal or email us at [email protected] if you have any questions.

Thank you for your understanding and patience.

Warm regards,

The NSCC Team

Cybersecurity Enhancement: Implementation of Security Intelligence Filtering

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Dear Users,

As part of our ongoing commitment to enhancing cybersecurity, we have implemented a new security measure – Security Intelligence Filtering. This enhancement is designed to automatically filter and block traffic from our HPC system to known malicious websites and domains on the internet, helping to safeguard our infrastructure and users.

With this implementation, you may experience access restrictions to certain websites or domains that are categorized as potential security risks. This may include some well-known platforms such as Hugging Face.

If you encounter access issues and believe a website or domain has been mistakenly blocked, please do not hesitate to contact our helpdesk via the Service Desk Portal or email us at [email protected]. for further clarification and verification.

Thank you for your cooperation and understanding as we continue to strengthen our security measures.

Warm regards,

The NSCC Team

[Completed] Urgent Scheduled Maintenance for ASPIRE 2A on 22 January 2025, 9AM to 6.30PM

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Dear ASPIRE 2A Users,

We are pleased to announce that the ASPIRE 2A urgent scheduled system maintenance has been completed. You may proceed to access the systems as per usual.

Should you have any questions or need assistance, please contact our Helpdesk via the Service Desk Portal or email us at [email protected] if you have any questions.

Thank you for your understanding and patience.

Warm regards,

The NSCC Team

Urgent Scheduled Maintenance for ASPIRE 2A on 22 January 2025, 9AM to 6.30PM

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Dear ASPIRE 2A Users,

We wish to inform you of an upcoming urgent scheduled system maintenance for ASPIRE 2A to enhance its long-term reliability, uptime, and stability.

Maintenance Details:

  • Start: 22 January 2025 (Wednesday), 9:00 AM SGT
  • End: 22 January 2025 (Wednesday), 6:30 PM SGT
  • Duration: 9.5 hours

Purpose:

To replace the faulty Cooling Distribution Unit (CDU) Actuator.

Impact During the Maintenance Period:

  • Unavailable Compute Resources:
    • 33% of CPU compute nodes
    • All GP-GPU compute nodes
    • 75% of large memory nodes
  • Available Compute Resources:
    • 66% of CPU compute nodes
    • All AI-GPU compute nodes
    • 25% of large memory nodes
  • Users will still be able to log in and access the ASPIRE 2A system during this time.

We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause and thank you for your understanding. Should you have any questions or need assistance, please contact our Helpdesk via the Service Desk Portal or email us at [email protected] if you have any questions.

Thank you for your understanding and patience.

Warm regards,

The NSCC Team

Removal of OpenMPI Modules on ASPIRE 2A

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Dear Users,

The following OpenMPI modules will be removed from ASPIRE 2A on 3 February 2025:

openmpi/4.1.4-aocc4.0

openmpi/4.1.5-aocc4

openmpi/4.1.5-gcc11

openmpi/4.1.5-icc22

openmpi/4.1.5-icc24

These modules were built statically, and following the update of PBS to a newer version, they no longer function correctly across multiple nodes. While MPI processes can still be spawned within a single compute node, these modules fail to communicate across nodes. As a result, applications built with these versions of OpenMPI will not run successfully on multiple nodes.

To ensure continuity in your workflows, we recommend transitioning to the following OpenMPI versions:

openmpi/4.1.2-hpe(default)

openmpi/4.1.6-gcc11

openmpi/4.1.7-gcc11

openmpi/4.1.7-icc24.2.1 

openmpi/5.0.5-gcc11

openmpi/5.0.5-icc24.2.1 

If you encounter any issues while using these versions, please do not hesitate to contact our helpdesk via the Service Desk Portal or email us at [email protected].

Thank you for your understanding and cooperation.

Warm regards,

NSCC Team