Since 2019, HCC has maintained two HPC clusters - Crane and Rhino. Due to the hardware being well out of warranty and becoming unmaintainable, Rhino is set to be retired as an HCC resource. Rhino served as a way to gain additional compute hours using still functional hardware from the previously retired Sandhills and Tusker clusters. In addition to the over 500M CPU hours Sandhills and Tusker provided to HCC researchers, Rhino provided an additional 50M CPU Hours during its lifetime.

Rhino will stop jobs this Saturday, May 21st and the cluster will be turned off on May 31st.

With the retirement of Rhino, all data stored on the $HOME and $WORK filesystems of Rhino will be removed following decommissioning. Users with data on Rhino are strongly encouraged to move their files as soon as possible to prevent data loss. For precious data, HCC provides the Attic resource as a way to reliably store data for a nominal cost. The $COMMON filesystem is another option, as it is available on both Crane and Rhino, 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.

HCC will work to make this transition as minimally disruptive as possible. Please contact [email protected] with any questions or concerns.

Sincerely,

Hongfeng Yu
Interim Director, Holland Computing Center