Upcoming Maintenance and CARC Updates
0.0.0.1 CARC systems will be down for maintenance and updates January 8 - January 12, 2025.
We will be conducting maintenance on CARC systems from 10:00 AM PDT on January 8 to 5:00 PM PDT on January 12. Compute nodes (including login and transfer nodes) are unavailable during this time. Please be aware that all jobs queued in Slurm will be lost. Any job that has not started before maintenance begins will need to be resubmitted. Along with upgrading Slurm, we are rolling out some very important updates; please read below for further information.
0.0.0.2 New /project2 storage system
We are introducing a new storage system called /project2. /project2 is an all-flash storage system with over 10 PB of total storage space. Twice as many file servers as /project make use of the increased performance of flash storage.
As before, PIs will receive 10 TB for free across their projects. /project is very near to capacity and will only be available for a few more years, therefore all new projects will be on /project2 going forward. /project2 boasts better performance, so we also encourage you to transfer your data from /project to the new system.
Because /project2 offers better performance, the new rate for storage allocations over 10 TB is $60/TB/year. Please keep this in mind when deciding to transfer data or request new allocations.
0.0.0.3 Rocky Linux 8 Migration
We are replacing CARC systems’ current CentOS 7 operating system with Rocky Linux 8. You will likely not encounter any major changes; however, the main impact will be on software. Data storage will not be impacted by the migration. A new release of software modules will be made available with a new set of default modules loaded in upon log in. The current software modules will still be available (but not by default) and existing software installations should still work. In some cases, software may need to be recompiled. We are happy to assist you with recompiling your software; email us at carc-support@usc.edu to submit a ticket.
Additionally, we are switching our supported software container to Apptainer. Apptainer has very similar features and functions as SingularityCE and existing Singularity container images should continue to run in Apptainer. New features include building container images directly on the cluster and running nested containers.
We will be updating the user guides to reflect these changes and will release more details as we get closer to launch. We hope you find value in the upgrades we are providing. If you have any questions or concerns, please reach out to us at carc-support@usc.edu.