...
Disclaimer: We cannot guarantee the following time frame! It is an optimistic view and can be disturbed by further lock downs in China, a ship may block the Suez channel, or it can be just small technical issues that prevent Albedo from smooth operation even with all hardware at AWI in time . Any any step can be delayed by weeks or months! Except the first "Now" step, which is in your hands ;-)
- Now Please start to prepare your directories on /work/ollie for transfer to Albedo!
- Delete data you do not need to keep,
- copy tarballs of valuable data to the tape archive (you should do this anyhow, /work has no backup),
- place a copy of data which you need continuously with fast access to /isibhv.
- We will not transfer data automatically from Ollie to Albedo!! This is a chance to clean up ;-)
- until April
NEC investigates if OmniPath is an alternative for Mellanox Infinband as the fast network in Albedo, because Infiniband would be delivered with a large delay - May
Albedo hardware has arrived at AWI. A small part is installed in the existing server racks and NEC starts to configure the management system and the GxFS file system. Unfortunately, we have to wait until 4 July before all of Albedo can be installed, see below. - 30. June
Ollie hardware support ends. As a prolongation would cost approx. 200.000€, we keep Ollie running w/o support, but with the option to have basic components (file system, network) repaired in case of an emergency (maintenance on demand). So far, we have very good experiences with the service of MegWare and are confident that we found a solution that is cost efficient and sustainable. - 4 July + following week
The floor in the server room has to be enforced. Then, all racks can be installed, the compute nodes, service nodes, disks, switches can be added. Cabling, configuration finalised, and off we go! - July
NEC + computing center start with configuration, software installation, first tests - August
Downtime to add Infiniband
Albedo open for power users
Start to copy data from Ollie to Albedo (Note: must be done by yourself, there is no automatic data migration!)
The more Albedo nodes are powered on, the more Ollie nodes have to be switched off. We have no schedule for this, but would decide depending on how useful Albedo already is for how many users. Of course, Albedo has a far better ratio of computing vs. electric power. - 30. June
Ollie hardware support ends. As a prolongation would cost approx. 200.000€, we keep Ollie running w/o support, but with the option to have basic components (file system, network) repaired in case of an emergency (maintenance on demand). So far, we have very good experiences with the service of MegWare and are confident that we found a solution that is cost efficient and sustainable. - August Downtime to add Infiniband, and then September
open to all users (when nearly everything works smoothly)