Crane Retirement - FINAL Reminder

Since 2013, HCC has operated and maintained multiple generations of the Crane HPC cluster alongside other HPC clusters. Due to the original hardware being well out of warranty and becoming unmaintainable, Crane is set to be retired as an HCC resource after nearly 10 years of service to Nebraska researchers. This will allow HCC to consolidate hardware into a single resource and improve performance and reliability. Since Crane's launch in 2013 at the 475th place in the Top500, Crane has provided over 640 million core hours and 2.3 million GPU hours to over 2,600 Nebraska researchers spanning 140 departments. Crane has stopped accepting new job submissions and existing jobs will be allowed to complete, with all jobs stopped by June 30th. The login node and storage will remain available until August 1st, 2023 to allow for migration of any remaining data.

With the retirement of Crane, all data stored on both the $HOME and $WORK filesystems of Crane will be removed following decommissioning. Users with data on Crane are strongly encouraged to move their files as soon as possible. For precious data, HCC provides the Attic resource to reliably store data for a nominal cost. The $COMMON filesystem is another option, as it is available on both Crane and Swan, and is not subject to the 6-month purge policy in effect on the $WORK filesystem. Please note data on $COMMON is not backed up; precious data should be additionally saved elsewhere. Each group is allocated 30TB of $COMMON space at no charge; additional space is available for a fee. For large data transfers, it is strongly encouraged to use Globus to transfer your data. The Globus transfer servers for Crane, Swan, and Attic provide a faster connection for the data transfer and provide checks on both ends of the data transfer.

As a part of the long-running plan to retire Crane, HCC deployed the Swan cluster in May 2022 as Crane’s replacement and made possible by investments from the UNL Office of Research and Economic Development and the Nebraska Research Initiative. Swan already has a significant number of resources available for general use, and will have the remaining in-warranty resources from Crane migrated into the Swan cluster. Most workflows from Crane can be used on Swan with little to no modification to software or submission scripts.