Retirement of Extreme and Saber Clusters by December 2023
Dear HPC Users,
Launched on January 29, 2014 as part of a campus-wide research computing initiative, the Extreme HPC Resource has served as UIC’s flagship supercomputing resource for numerous departments and colleges. By December 2023, Extreme and SABER will be roughly 10 and 7 years old, respectively. Over the course of these years, Extreme and SABER have provided over 400 million core hours of computing to over 2,600 UIC users spanning 14 colleges. These clusters have served the UIC community well by enabling scientific discovery and instructional innovation. However, all good things must come to an end and in December 2023 we will be sunsetting these clusters, along with their associated storage systems, due to the increasingly difficult challenges we face maintaining this end-of-life hardware.
We are replacing these clusters with a new state-of-the-art HPC cluster and recently announced the relaunch of the HPC Partnership program. Call for participation is now open and the new cluster is expected to go online sometime this Summer. We strongly encourage you and your colleagues to consider participating in this cluster program to ensure a smooth transition.
We also recognize that this change entails moving significant amounts of research data to different systems. In the coming months, we will be sending out several announcements regarding new storage options available to UIC researchers through ACER. Our staff will gladly work with you and your teams to identify storage options to meet your specific needs and finalize data migration plans by June 2023.
Our goal is to communicate often, be transparent and provide ample opportunity for us to connect with our community. Please contact acer@uic.edu with any questions or concerns. You can also request a one-on-one consultation with one of our ACER staff members.
Finally, as stewards and operators of Extreme and SABER, we would like to take this opportunity to thank all the users who advanced UIC’s mission with the use of these systems. We hope that you will join us in making the next chapter of HPC computing at UIC even more successful.
Thanks,
Your ACER team