COSMOS Status

Recent News:

Archive:

COSMOS News Bulletins

This web page provides the most up-to-date information on the operational status of COSMOS and future downtimes. If COSMOS is unreachable, Consult this page to find out why.

Operational status

COSMOS (Altix 4700) is OFFLINE (only to come online on specific request)

UNIVERSE (Altix UV) is UP

OBERON (NFS server) is UP.

MOAB/Torque (workload management system) is UP.

Please notify cosmos_sys immediately (telephone 01223 339740) if you find the system unresponsive despite the information on this page.

Scheduled downtimes:

Exceptional maintenance
Regular maintenance
Every week 9am-3pm Wednesday.

Recent news

(20/03/11) .amtp.cam.ac.uk domain names gone

NOTE: the old way of referring to machines with .amtp.cam.ac.uk names has stopped working.

We (DAMTP) have recently been working towards finally removing the 'amtp' forms of names as we promised to do when we were allowed to start using 'damtp' names in 1993.

As of 11th March we removed all the machine names of the form xxx.amtp.cam.ac.uk so attempting to use those DNS names - e.g ssh'ing to universe.amtp.cam.ac.uk will no longer work. Simply replace the 'amtp' part of the name with 'damtp' for a name which will continue to work.

(24/03/10) COSMOS is getting MOAB Suite

MOAB/Torque installation takes longer than expected. The work will have to be continued next day.

(17/03/10) PBSPro is to be replaced soon

PBSPro license nearly run its course and we have opted for the more advanced workload management system - MOAB Grid Suite from Adaptive Computing (former ClusterResources)

News Archive

(18/03/09) COSMOS going for ProPack6

COSMOS was running quite steadily since last system update in July 2008. now is the time to give it another boost, by going to the latest ProPack6 from SGI. This update requires the basis OS upgrade too, so the procedure is rather complex and time consuming.

(09/07/08) COSMOS updated to ProPack5

Finally, we have COSMOS environment updated to much more recent Novell SLES 10SP1 operating system with SGI ProPack 5SP5 addons.

It took so long (ProPack 5 and SLES10 were released quite some time ago), because it was not a simple question of OS update. During the update - CXFS was removed, Microcosm (CXFS server, running on IRIX) was retired; file systems migrated, new storage RAID installed, existing RAIDs re-connected; new version of LSF installed; new Intel compilers installed; COSMOLIB re-built... And the process is not over yet - there are areas which need some work.

And there is a new service pack for SLES10 out already, waiting for install (should not be that involving though)

(30/05/08) STFC Final Report submitted

Our report about COSMOS activities in the period 2006-08 was submitted to STFC. Here is the submitted version and here is the report in PDF format for offline reading (about 1.3Mb).

(30/05/08) Victor's last day

Today was Victor Travieso's last day with the COSMOS consortium before moving on to greener pastures in the entertainment/technology industry. His contributions loom large in the STFC Final Report; he particularly played a vital role when he ran COSMOS single-handedly during 2007. We thank him for his very capable contributions to UK cosmology over the past 4.5 years and wish him well for the future.

(19/05/08) STFC Report is due

COSMOS REPORT. We need a final STFC report about our scientific achievements over the last 3 years - before the end of the month. Much of this has been done implicitly through our recent proposals for HPC funding, but we need an update for the last year. Andrey will circulate everyone with their COSMOS publications and we would be grateful if you could cooperate by updating these (using SPIRES BibTeX format) and write a sentence or two about your own research highlights.

(19/05/08) PPAN Presentation today

This is a critical week concerning STFC funding for HPC. Today Carlos Frenk is giving a PPAN presentation about the findings of the Theory and Computation panel (of which Andrew Liddle is also a member).

(19/05/08) Victor is leaving

VICTOR TRAVIESO. In light of the recent funding problems at STFC, it was sad but prudent for Victor to look around for other employment opportunities. It wasn't long before Frontiers, a large entertainment/technology company, offered him a senior role in the development team for their core physics and graphics engine. We are extremely grateful for all his efforts over the past 4 years on behalf of the UK cosmology community. Victor is clearly an outstanding programmer, he was able to extract vastly improved efficiency and performance out of almost any code he touched, and he is very friendly, flexible, patient and helpful. Moreover, he is also a talented HPC sysadmin, running COSMOS in the interregnum between Stuart and Andrey, during which he single-handedly oversaw our last major upgrade. We are sure the whole consortium will join us in wishing him well in this new and exciting challenge. He will remain in touch in Cambridge ...

(19/05/08) COSMOS upgrade delayed (a bit)

The earlier announced COSMOS upgrade, which was scheduled for this week, is going to be delayed for two weeks, due to the vendor's move across the border. (LSI has moved its factory to Mexico). As a result, we have some change of plans. We age going to close COSMOS for the maintenance this Wednesday (21/05/08) and the next one (28/05/08), to prepare filesystems for the migration and also to test the system within the new environment (OS SLES10SP1 and SGI ProPack5) with the Cosmolib rebuilt.

(08/05/08) COSMOS is evolving

As you know very well, the Universe is evolving and so do the tools to study this evolution. COSMOS has been an integral part of those tools for many years, steadily growing in size and capabilities, so we are happy to announce that it is time for it to evolve yet again.

Presuming that our STFC grant allocation becomes available later this year, you will get a huge boost in computing power and storage, but before that can happen, COSMOS needs an intermediate upgrade. In two weeks time (Wednesday, 21/05/08), COSMOS is going down for an uplift; in brief summary - more Raid, larger 100Gb backed-up user home directories, and comprehensive OS and job scheduler upgrades.

We are going to retire the IRIX file server, which served us so well for an era and with it CXFS - the clustered file system, which is no longer compatible with the further planned COSMOS upgrades. We also are going to install a new RAID storage appliance, which would allow us to streamline the storage arrangements and give you more space and better backup capabilities.

There is one inevitable drawback of this upgrade - the Viz server (Cosmos2) will no longer be on one file system with Cosmos, so it won't be possible to run visualizations directly, as you were accustomed to before - data files would have to be transferred first to the local storage. It is a small inconvenience, but hopefully not for long, as we plan to get a brand new and much more powerful Viz server with the said upgrade later this year.

After this coming May upgrade you will no longer have cosmos-med separate storage. Instead, you will get a significantly larger home storage, which is fully backed up. (At the moment you quota on cosmos home is 1GB - it will go up to 100GB after the upgrade)

An essential part of this upgrade is also the install of the latest OS, SGI ProPack and job scheduler versions, which would allow fo better overall performance and better reporting/system tuning capabilities. Not all the consequences of this move are apparent until the upgrade is done, but one is pretty certain - most of the in-house developed libraries and applications will require complete rebuild (re-compilation) for the new system.

Please use the remaining time (two weeks from now) to go through your files in all three locations on COSMOS (/local/cosmos/ /local/cosmos-med/ /local/cosmos-tmp/) and clean them up as much as possible (backup to outside locations, remove duplicates, non-necessary files, commonly available source codes, etc. Especially pay attention to the /local/cosmos-med/ folders - move them out to /local/cosmos-tmp/ folders if necessary. Those files which remain in /local/cosmos-med/ will be archived to the /local/cosmos/ location during the upgrade. We do not expect any data loss, but we cannot fully backup everything we have on COSMOS, so cannot guarantee 100% the data safety. Better to be prudent now than sorry later.

That is all for now. If you have any questions regarding the upgrade, please do not hesitate to ask cosmos_sys