Bulletin 160 - 2006 Aug 02

1. E-mail failures on previous HPCbulls
2. HPCCC Staff Changes
3. New cherax this Saturday: batch memory limit and find
4. CSIRO: HPSC Blog

Issue 158 (my first as editor) was not correctly sent, and also some users have missed out on some other issues. We think our lists and procedures are now correct, but if you see this HPCbull in some other way and didn't get it by e-mail then please let us know.

We encourage all users to look at our HPCbull archive at http://www.hpccc.gov.au/hpccc/user_news_advice/news/index.shtml for relevant items. In particular note the items about the software change on cherax on the 5th August (this Saturday). This is a major change.

There is a "What's New" section at the top of the news page: http://www.hpccc.gov.au/hpccc/user_news_advice/. HPCCC users are advised to check it on a weekly basis.

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John Stern has joined the Bureau's Meteorological Systems Group and is replaced in the HPCCC by Hai Doan, who has many years of experience on various mission critical platforms and storage systems. Hai is primarily responsible for the TX7s and is being familiarised with the SX-6; his extension is 4276. Please note that John is no longer supporting HPCCC systems.

NEC has added Peter Edwards to their support roster for the HPCCC. Peter has many years of experience including with CDC, CRAY, and SGI. Many CSIRO users know Peter Edwards, who was our on-site Cray support expert and system manager back in Y-MP days.

Join us in welcoming Hai and Peter.

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Cherax software upgrade to SUSE will go ahead this Saturday. You still have 2 days to test on cherax-1.

The default memory limits on cherax after the upgrade to SUSE linux will be vmem=500mb for general jobs. If your job needs more memory, specify it with the vmem option on your qsub command. We have found some jobs might also require more memory on SUSE than on Redhat, and the vmem request must be adjusted accordingly.

There is also a reported change to whether "." and ".." are returned when using find with the option -name "*".

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Please try our experimental HPSC blog. It will include pointers to new and changed information of interest to HPSC users and potential users, and computing support professionals in CSIRO. We are using blog software so that:

• You can add comments. Please do. We promise to read them.
• Generation of RSS or Atom feeds. Please add us to your RSS feeds.

You'll find it at http://intra.hpsc.csiro.au/weblog/HPSCblog/.

If it's useful we'll keep it. Let us know.

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